I shifted my weight from one foot to another. ‘As I said … Johnny Solheim’s death.’

‘I’ve already made a statement to the police. Who are you actually?’

‘My name’s Varg Veum. Johnny and I grew up together.’

‘Yes, you look his age. I have nothing to say.’

‘But you’d arranged to meet him on Saturday?’

She demonstratively pursed her lips.

‘That was why you went missing, mid-dance. And that’s why he didn’t show up.’

She opened her mouth a centimetre. Then she closed it again.

‘Or did you meet him? In the street?’

Silence. The MC on Sky was talking like an ice-hockey reporter at a world-cup final with two minutes to go and Russia one goal in front.

I tightened the screw. ‘With a knife in your hand.’

She looked desperate. ‘No, I didn’t meet him. I disappeared to avoid meeting him. He thought he … He was beginning to imagine things.’

‘What? The same as all the rest of us in the auditorium?’

‘That’s show time,’ she said as though she were talking to a toddler. ‘It’s a role I play.’

‘Bags of experience, it seems.’

‘It seems!’ she repeated, mockingly. ‘What you see on stage is not me. This here is me. A very ordinary girl from Lindås.’262

‘Not quite so ordinary. I mean – when we met you in the dressing room and the day after at the Hot Spot … it didn’t exactly seem as if you…’

‘It was still just play-acting. In between two performances plus a couple of hours afterwards. You can’t just flick your fingers and switch from one personality to another…’

‘Like Danny Kaye in The Court Jester?’

‘Who?’

‘Forget it. But in the middle of what you call play-acting, you definitely turned Johnny on.’

She put on a sparkling but hermetic smile: ‘I’m not stupid, am I. I understand what I do to men and it makes me … I like to see them dangling there, helpless. As randy as baboons in glass cages, while I’m on the outside and … revealing myself!’

‘That can’t be without its dangers.’

‘It’s never been dangerous for me.’

‘It definitely sounds like a dysfunctional form of sexuality.’

‘So maybe I come from a dysfunctional background?’

‘Yes?’

‘Maybe I promised myself once that no one will have me until I want it. Until I’m legally married.’

‘And why? Nowadays?’

‘Listen to me. I come from … I grew up in the darkest chapel milieu you can imagine.’

‘That must be dark.’

‘But still I remember my childhood as light. I had lots of brothers and sisters and we had a good time. But all the childbirths took their toll on my mother, so much so that when she became pregnant yet again her doctor recommended an abortion. Otherwise her life could’ve been in danger. But Pappa was against it. Killing a foetus was a sin, he said, the same as taking 263out a subscription for eternal damnation. So she didn’t … and…’ Her voice faded and stopped.