At last she looked up.

‘… any kind of systematic drugs regime,’ she rounded off, pushing the sheet of paper back across the table.

‘Exactly. Hege’s concentration was also low. Seven nanograms per millilitre, so higher than Haakon’s, but all the same totally insignificant amounts. Unfortunately for me …’

He raised the cup to his mouth and tried again, as if the liquid could have cooled down in a mere thirty seconds.

‘Unfortunately for Hege,’ he began again, ‘it was more than three months since she was last tested. In other words, she hasn’t the same …’

He hesitated for so long that Selma gave him some assistance.

‘Alibi,’ she said. ‘Haakon has a watertight alibi. At least the earlier test gives a strong indication that he hasn’t consciously been taking drugs. That wouldn’t prevent him from being suspended, but it could have been important in terms of how long he was barred from competing.’

Jan nodded.

He had thought for a long time that he had a good knowledge of her. Smart and capable. Social. Outgoing and easy to understand. An efficient lawyer, with a network of contacts even he envied. It seemed as if she knew the whole of Norway.

Norway definitely knew her.

So when he began to suspect that there were substantial sums missing from the client account in his name, he simply could not believe it. As a rule, Jan Morell believed in himself. Always, in fact, but untypically he had chosen to hope that there might be an alternative explanation as to why he was unable to access his money, when out of the blue he received an offer of a favourable investment.

She had admitted everything immediately, as she should. Did not plead for mercy. On the contrary, she told him sotto voce that it had all started around six months ago. A small amount now and then, usually repaid within a short time. Then something must have gone seriously wrong. What had been until then a continuous fairly easily camouflaged misappropriation of funds had turned into regular theft. It took him longer to learn what the money had been spent on than to obtain a confession.

She liked to gamble, was what she had finally admitted. On everything, apparently, without being willing to go into details.

The meeting in Selma’s tasteful office in Bogstadveien had taken place four weeks ago. She changed abruptly. She was still her usual smiling, pleasant and correct self to others, he noticed. But not to him.

He had begun to realize that she was actually extremely lonely.

As he was.

The difference was that he had chosen it. Just as he had decided that his life should take a sharp turn when at barely seventeen he had met Katinka, he had chosen another new direction when she died. For a quarter of a century he had been permitted to keep her, and the loneliness after her death was a way of still being together.