‘When the rumour started to circulate that Haakon might also have fallen foul of drugs, I realized that this could be a straw for Hege to clutch.’

Selma did not react. She gazed at him, searchingly, with her body locked down. Her arms folded over her chest and her legs crossed.

Selma Falck looked like an athlete. Even after so many years. Jan had followed the fourth season of the reality TV show, Champion of Champions, in 2012, primarily because a friend was taking part. A rapid mental calculation told him that Selma must have been forty-six when the series was filmed. She had ended up in fourth place, as the best woman. And was far more fascinating to follow than Jan’s friend, who had won. Selma was tall and possibly a kilo or two heavier than in her prime. All the same there was fluidity in her movements and strength in the way she conducted herself that did not entirely chime with her real age. Her face was broad, her chin almost square; there was a trace of masculinity that disappeared each time she smiled with wide, full lips that were obviously not the result of any cosmetic trickery.

She had not smiled since her arrival.

Her eyes were slightly too far apart, he noticed now for the first time. Almond-shaped, a little crooked and so dark that in this dim light he could not distinguish the pupils from the irises.

‘What do you mean?’ she said in the end.

‘Look at this,’ he said, pushing a sheet of paper towards her.

She picked it up. Read. A frown bisected her forehead.

‘Haakon was tested six days before he died,’ she said without looking up.

‘Yes.’

‘And you’ve managed to come up with those results already.’

Jan sighed. He leaned back again and clasped his hands behind his neck.

‘Don’t sound so surprised, Selma. I was your client for nine years. You know I can pull strings. You know I never do anything illegal. It gets a bit tedious if you’re going to make a song and dance about it every time I …’

Suddenly he leaned forward and grabbed his coffee cup.

‘… get things moving. What else do you notice about that?’

He raised his cup and tilted it carefully towards her before he took a drink. The coffee was too hot and he put it down again before adding: ‘As you see, the sample taken just before he died was absolutely clean. But the post-mortem sample shows a concentration of Clostebol of three nanograms per millilitre. What does that tell you?’

Selma was still staring at the sheet of paper.

‘That he can’t have taken the substance to achieve any kind of performance-enhancing effect,’ she said slowly. ‘Clostebol has, as far as I remember, a half-life of eight hours. He was clean at the start of last week, and with such a low concentration as this only a few days later, he can’t possibly have been on …’