In the tower blocks around the car park there were many dark windows where hundreds of people could have been watching if they were at all interested.

As if to signal that I knew someone was there I made a not completely random tour of the parked cars, bent down and at regular intervals peered into some, but I didn’t find anyone hiding.

Then I strolled with an assumed nonchalance towards the block where Belinda Bruflåt was supposed to live.

I had a tingling sensation in my neck the whole way.

It wouldn’t go away.

I went into the entrance of the terrace block. B. Bruflåt it said on one of the post boxes.

I took the staircase, found her name on the second floor and rang the bell. Out of habit I checked my watch. It was a quarter to nine.

The door opened. At first I barely recognised her. Her hair was flat and unkempt, her face grey without make-up, and she was wearing ordinary, worn jeans and a grey-and-white cardigan, buttoned to the top. She seemed chubbier than on the stage and looked closer to thirty than twenty.260

However, it appeared she recognised me because she went salmon-pink and tried to close the door.

I quickly shoved the tip of my shoe in the doorway and said: ‘You were just going out, you said. I could still be there waiting.’

With a contemptuous flash in her eye, she said: ‘I don’t sell in doorways.’

‘But on the stage you give everything?’

She nodded. ‘So if you’re looking for a trick you’ve come to the wrong place, pal,’ she said in English. She was fluent in both Lindås dialects.

‘Was that what Johnny was after too?’

‘I…’ She gasped.

‘May I come in?’ I interrupted.

‘No.’

I looked around, glanced up the stairs and said in a loud voice: ‘Was Johnny after a trick too?’

‘I’ll call the police.’

‘You do that,’ I said, walking past her into the hall. ‘I’ll dial the number for you.’

She followed me, but without closing the front door after her.

‘I only want to talk to you. About Johnny’s death.’

Her face had gone ashen. ‘You’d better … We’d better…’ She went to the door and slammed it shut.

There was an embarrassing silence. We were standing in a much too large hall-cum-dining room, with a wardrobe for coats to the left and a dining table with chairs to the right. Through a glass door was another room, with modernist furniture in synthetic leather and chrome metal. A TV screen was tuned to Sky and playing a music video. On the walls hung posters she had bought from IKEA, mass-produced prints of skerryscapes with a green sea and an ochre sky. All that was missing was Ulf 261Lundell coming in from the kitchen and singing his latest Swedish hit.

I nodded towards the sitting-room. ‘Should we…?’

She looked at me, in a buttoned-up, reserved manner, which made me wonder once again whether this was Belinda or her twin sister I had in front of me. ‘We can stay here. What’s this about?’