I pretended to ignore it and looked around. The room was a monument to a musty November, a chronic area of low pressure. The portraits in the oval frames stared down their noses at me, as though they were glad they didn’t have to be here in person.

Then she returned, holding a faded photograph with a pink tint. She plumped down heavily again and after studying the picture herself for a few moments passed it to me. The cat leaped back onto her lap, and Anita patted it absent-mindedly while I examined the amateur snap.

It showed a stout woman, in stature she might easily have 207been Anita Solheim’s half-sister, standing by the corner of a house somewhere near the sea. The wind had lifted her hair like a mushroom cloud over her marked features: dark, heavy eyebrows, and a mouth like a garage door. On the back of the picture someone had written in grey pencil: Halldis H, 1977.

Anita Solheim nodded towards the photograph. ‘It was her. I know it was. I remember because we … because I spoke to her immediately after Johnny and I separated and she was right behind me.’

‘Have you been in touch since then?’

‘I was for a while. A few years. But then that petered out too. I’ve never been much good at keeping in contact with people. Besides…’

‘Yes?’

‘Well, she changed too,’ she said, swinging again between candour and reticence.

‘What was her surname?’

‘Heggøy. Halldis Heggøy. She was from Øygården. Somewhere north of Blomøy. We went to visit her there once. Right by the sea. They picked her up when they were playing there. On Rong, I’d guess.’

‘Do you think she still lives there?’

‘She definitely moved back there after she and Arild … I visited her a few times, last in 1978, maybe seventy-nine. Before that she worked in town.’

‘Doing what?’

‘Shop assistant. She worked in a textiles shop in Strandgaten.’

‘And at home?’

‘Up there? I think she has a smallholding. And she knits jumpers for the arts-and-crafts folk and sews traditional costumes. She was always good with her hands. If Sissel had needed 208a traditional dress for her confirmation I would’ve gone to her for certain. But young people aren’t interested in that anymore.’

We were back where we started.

‘Anita, I’ve heard a rumour. Tell me…’

She looked at me without saying a word.

‘Is it true that once upon a time you had an affair with Jakob Aasen?’

Her face assumed a frozen expression, like a gravestone, one that would be petrified until doomsday.

‘I don’t mean to—’

She cut me short. ‘No? And so what? It happened a hundred years ago and it had absolutely no meaning beyond … what it was.’

‘Mm, so there was…?’

She went on the offensive. ‘And how many dark chapters are there in your past? Would you like it if I asked you?’

I raised my palms in defence.

‘Now I think it’s time you were on your way.’