The latter was harder.

I had too many thoughts, and they spanned too many years. I searched for a clear pattern, but one of the main pieces in the jigsaw was still missing and its name was Ruth Solheim.

I rang Beate, my ex-wife, and arranged to pick up Thomas the following morning. Then I went to my car, snatching the prey from the claws of the two uniformed vultures waiting with bated breath around a corner for the sands in my hourglass to run out. Then I made a tour of what I called ‘the milieu’. I netted various birds in flight and rolled down the car window to talk to every girl I met, but without a tangible result. Ruth, who on earth was she? Yeah, they thought they’d seen her, but it was months ago.331

Then I met someone who had seen her … ‘Tuesday, was it? Yeah, in Sandviken, in a house with a demolition order … What, the address? She’d just slipped in with a customer. She didn’t live there.’ A girl’s thin voice said: ‘She probably had her own flat.’

That was as close as I got.

I drove home, changed into my tracksuit, jogged slowly up Fjellveien, did some stretches by the water trough on which it says horses need to rest, and then headed for Isdalen.

The moon was above the mountains – a misty winter moon packed into greenish cotton, like an old Christmas tree bauble you find in the loft, in a cardboard box you had forgotten was there. The trees stood black and threatening, like a line of dead soldiers along the last part of the road to the Powder House. The moon reflected hazily in Svartediket lake, as though the bauble still wasn’t properly clean. And as I ran along the roads, my brain slowly cleansing itself, fresh oxygen allowed my thoughts to align themselves in new formations and more ideas emerged.

The valley was deserted. In the distance some Alsatian owners were taking their dogs for a walk. A lone jogger ran towards me, out of the darkness, and was gone; but on the last part it was just me alone with nature.

The mountains towered above, like pillars supporting the firmament, and in the broad Tarlebødal valley the moon shone its pale light over the abandoned farmhouses, as lifeless as granite and as silent as the rest of the terrain, one Friday night in December, two days before the winter solstice.

After arriving home and taking a shower, I dug out the telephone number of Helga Bøe. I called and asked if Rebecca was in. She wasn’t.

I called Jakob. He was in. I asked if he had spoken to Vegard Vadheim. He hadn’t. ‘I’m not taking this that seriously, Varg.’332

‘Right. No cause for alarm. There were only four of you, and now there’s one left. And the last person to receive a similar letter in the post was only Johnny.’

‘There doesn’t have to be a connection, does there?’