‘I don’t want your filthy Judas money.’ She leaned forward heavily as though she were a bouncer at the Crisis Centre and I didn’t have adequate ID. ‘I want you to promise not to say a word about what you’ve seen here today…’

‘I promise. Cross my heart, if that has any value in this house.’

She smiled wryly. We were almost on the same wavelength now. ‘OK. His name wasn’t exactly unusual … Jan Petter Olsen.’

‘Jan Petter!’ For the second time my spine ran cold, but this time it was for quite a different reason.

‘Yes.’ She studied my face. ‘Anything the matter?’

I said bluntly: ‘Nothing, except that he’s dead too.’ After a while I added: ‘I went to his funeral last Friday.’

She heaved a sigh and splayed her hands. ‘All that other stuff – I’ve forgotten it.’

I stood up. Heading for the door, I reminded her: ‘As I said, you can expect a visit. And it might be a good idea to lock the door when … you’re busy. In case anyone else should stumble over you as I…’239

I followed the bloodstains out, but they weren’t fresh and red anymore. They were black like pitch.

Outside, the day had closed the gates. All you could see on the horizon was a thin line of grey mixed with red, like the light that shines under the door before the very last lamps are extinguished and everyone goes to bed. Only the night is awake. For night is the daughter of the sea. She walks quietly on wet, bare feet across a dark, wooden floor while everyone else is asleep or dead.

240

32

I followed the tarmac trail south in the borderland between light and darkness. To the west lay the sea, like a bottomless throat with the dying day a noose around its neck. Light from the strongest stars barely penetrated the night mist, and a long way out a ship was slowly making for warmer climes. Otherwise it was total darkness out there: doomsday at night. To the east I could make out distress signals from the last civilisation. The lights in Olsvik and on Askøy, up Fjellsiden and across to Åsane glittered prettily, like a milky way of pearls cast to swine, in the most northerly parts of a lost world, on the precipice of two kinds of death. One: sudden and violent, in an inferno of exploding bombs; the second: slow suffocation in poisoned nature with a disintegrating ozone layer and infected by an invisible plague.

Around me lay granite rocks like grey alloys of the night darkness. I regularly met evening drivers, on their way home from work in Ågotnes or Bergen. The odd speeding motorist overtook me with brake lights that became fresh bloodstains along the white central stripe in front of me, before darkness swallowed them up.

I stopped in Loddefjord and bought a hamburger. I pondered what my next step should be. I wasn’t at all confident that Anita Solheim would give me any more information today. I was very keen to talk to her older daughter, Ruth, though. And perhaps the younger one, Sissel.241