‘Yeah, yeah, but that was Johnny and not me. What could … Who would have any interest in killing me?’

‘There might be a connection, Jakob. We can chat later. I have work to do.’

‘Wait, Varg. What do you mean? What connection could there be?’

I reflected. Then I went for the jugular. ‘What happened in 1975, Jakob, to The Harpers? Just give it some thought before we meet again. See you.’

I put down the telephone before he had a chance to object.

Sweat was running down my back, but my legs were frozen where the cold December air blew in through the silver grille at the bottom of the telephone box.

I left and walked back to my car.

I pulled a map from the side pocket of the door and looked 224up Øygården to be sure. But it wasn’t really necessary. You just had to follow the smell of the sea.

It was bridge country. The archipelago of islands, big and small, was connected by the multi-jointed bones of a finger. The last bridge, over Ronge sound, had been opened as recently as eight months earlier, in April.

Now you could drive from Sotra to Hellesøy on the new road to the north. If you climbed the highest crags there, you could see over to Hernar in all kinds of weather and up to Fedje and Hellesøy lighthouse in clear conditions. On shimmering summer days or on winter days when the light was as sharp as honed knives you could see as far as Ytre Sogn and the television mast in Gulen.

In the middle of Sotra bridge I felt the first gust of wind catch the car, set its back against the bonnet and force me to accelerate to maintain my speed.

To the left, facing the sea, were the steep mountainsides on the southern side of Sotra. To the right, Askøylandet lay like an ink stain on the canvas-like December sea. Behind Askøy, Øygården pointed towards the North Pole and the empty space beyond.

In many ways this was Vestland at its wildest. Here you felt you were scraping your stomach against Norwegian bedrock, which, unyielding and obstinate, had resisted passing glaciers, the stranglehold of autumn storms and the eternal chafing of the sea. There was something scoured and grey and smooth about the whole landscape, the islands like the bald pates of ancient dwarfs barely protruding from the water and sombrely surveying life. Few places were as bare as these islands, abandoned to the caprices of the sea, some of the most wind-blown outposts of the Norwegian kingdom.225

I turned off by Kolltveit and drove slowly in the fifty km/h zone through a green valley oasis, as fertile as a biblical revelation, a response to all the prayers in the chapel.

This district, too, was in a transitional phase. Fishing had as good as died out, agriculture was an activity you pursued in your free time, the new bridges had moved a large number of workplaces to the mainland and the oil industry had long made its incursion into the region.