Young girl and old woman, infant and adult, daughter and mother, she had been all of these, only to be left standing alone at the gates, without parents, with a husband who died too young, and not even accompanied by her son. With her this small family died out. In Strangehagen the young bride had been shown the door, the sewing machine thrown on the rubbish heap and no one remembered Ingeborg Kløve anymore.

I got up and left without saying goodbye to the pike woman who caught the bus to the hospital and back, every afternoon, all year round. I sneaked down the corridor, away from the marching-band man, away from the vacant eyes, to the accompaniment of the most pitiable screams, which did not find any consolation in the enduringly monotonous: ‘Jesus – Jesus – Jesus…’

That is how we leave them, the things we have used. We keep the games we have grown out of in such rooms as these, the lives that were ours before we became mature enough to understand 215this, the fates that await us too in years to come. We turn our backs on spring and steer towards autumn, every one of us. We just don’t know how soon it will be upon us.

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29

Downstairs at the reception desk I asked for a telephone directory, flicked through to the Øygården section and began to search. Sure enough there was a Halldis Heggøy with a telephone and an address.

I looked at my watch. I didn’t feel like ringing and announcing my arrival in advance. On the other hand, a wasted trip to Øygården would delay the second visit I had planned to make today.

I postponed the Øygården trip for a few hours, cut through Løvstakk tunnel back to town, but turned off at Puddefjord bridge and followed Carl Konows gate and Kringsjåveien across Laksevåg again. I parked down from the house where I had met Bente Solheim a couple of days previously, before the sudden death I had witnessed. Before getting out of the car I discreetly recced the area. No undercover cops hunkered down in car seats with newspapers in front of their faces. No sudden reflections from the lenses of camouflaged binoculars. No suspicious-looking walkers on a morning stroll through the district. I scanned the block of flats: no uniformed guards outside.

I got out of the car, walked up to the building, round the corner to the main entrance and into the hall.

I continued up the staircase to the first floor and rang the bell next to the door with frosted wire-mesh panes.

There were no children’s voices inside this time, and Bente 217Solheim wasted no time opening the door, almost as though she had been expecting me.

But she didn’t appear to recognise me. Her face was – if possible – even thinner than the last time I had seen her. She wore no make-up and the big bruise had faded considerably, but not so much that you wouldn’t notice it. She was wearing grey jeans, a grey jumper and red shoes, and her eyes suggested she was as doped as an Olympics powerlifting champion.