She came to an abrupt halt on the pavement. She was looking straight into my eyes now, as though I were telling her something she hadn’t thought about before. Her nostrils narrowed and paled, and her face seemed to shrink for a moment, as if with pain. ‘They … are,’ she enunciated slowly.

‘And you still know nothing about the events of that night? Nothing?’

‘Nothing, Varg.’

We stood eyeing each other for a moment. A welding torch 255on the building site hissed, and high above us, atop a cone of light, a big crane swung from west to east, dangling a gigantic steel beam from a hook.

‘Berge Brevik. What did he want, Rebecca?’

‘That’s got nothing to do with you, Varg. I’ve already told you.’

‘These other women. Did you have any contact with them, later?’

She started to walk again, into the illuminated, blue-steel corridor. Our hollow footsteps echoed against the walls, like the whe-eep of wet flycatchers. ‘Which women?’

‘Anita Solheim and her daughters. Halldis Heggøy. Were there any others?’

She shook her head. ‘We didn’t have anything to do with each other – before the break-up.’

‘Why not?’

‘We had nothing in common. Unlike the boys. They had their music.’

She stopped in front of the entrance to a bus bay. A cold gust of wind tousled our hair and we automatically turned up our collars.

She looked at me with an indefinable expression in her eyes, as though I had walked her home for the first time and we still didn’t know if we should kiss.

Then she shrugged, turned, and walked up the steps to the boarding platforms.

I watched her go.

Halfway up she stopped and turned back to me. ‘Varg.’

Our eyes met, the way they had done when we were alone in the room all of a sudden and no more than eighteen years old. ‘Yes?’256

‘Oh, nothing.’ She made a gesture with her hand, carried on up and was gone.

‘Yes, I suppose it was,’ I said to the empty staircase, reached inside my coat pocket, unfolded my thoughts again and followed them like a street map back to Fosswinckelsgate to retrieve my car.

257

35

I got into the car, still deeply immersed in thought. The air was cold and damp. A layer of white frost flowers had settled on the windscreen, which I had to get out and scrape off, the way a petulant chimpanzee pulls up tulips from a flower bed in a zoo. When I started the engine the radio was playing ‘You Always Hurt the One You Love’. I switched off the radio, released the clutch and shot off more abruptly than was good for the car.

There was one name on my list for the day. It was Belinda Bruflåt. The last I had seen of her was when she left me on the dance floor like some schoolboy, and I didn’t know if I had the strength of character to meet the wall head-on again today.