‘N-no.’

Tentatively I said: ‘What did he do to you?’

Her lips trembled. ‘Can’t you see?’

‘Yes, but … did he do any more?’

Tears ran from her eyes and I heard a sound as if from a snorkel inside her battered nose. I saw her throat constrict and she gasped for air as if she were drowning.

‘Did he rape you? Belinda?’

She stared at me with black sparks issuing from between her glued eyelids. Then she pulled her dressing gown tighter around her neck, as if afflicted by a sudden chill. She nodded.

The heat in my stomach rose up my spine and turned to ice. ‘You have to report him, Belinda. What he’s done is punishable by law.’

She said in a monotone: ‘And who’ll be my witnesses? The people who were in the audience watching my show? Everyone I’ve teased and played with, from up on the stage, always at a safe distance? He didn’t do anything different to what they’d all dreamed of doing. You, too, Veum…’

‘But not in this way. Not like this.’ I raised both hands to my face and grimaced with disgust. ‘This isn’t how it should be, Belinda.’

‘And if you don’t want to do it, what then?’ she said.

We stood looking at each other.

I let my eyes wander around the room. The yellow-and-green skerry picture looked like a scene from a bad dream, a colour-blind nightmare. ‘I’ll talk to him, Belinda. I have a score to settle with him anyway. I’m pretty sure it was him who hit me the last 349time I was here. The question is, was he the person who took Johnny’s life and expedited the other two?’

She was stunned. ‘But why…? Why?’

‘Maybe … maybe the cause of all this wasn’t eleven years ago, in 1975. It’s here and now. I don’t know. Where does he live?’

‘Somewhere in Eidsvågsneset. You’ll find the exact address in the phone book.’

‘And we’re talking about the same man, are we?’

‘I-I think so.’

‘We’re talking about Stig Madsen?’

She nodded with an anguished sob.

‘But … there’s another address you’ll have to give me, Belinda.’

She raised her head slowly again. ‘Which one?’

‘Ruth Solheim’s.’

Again she averted her face, but this time it wasn’t with pain. ‘I c-can’t.’

‘You can. She may have the key to everything. I have to talk to her.’

‘But I don’t have it.’

‘Yes, you do. I know you do. She told Roar in Lindås. You would put her up, she said.’ I looked around. ‘She’s not here, is she?’

She shook her head. Then she stopped herself and held her temple, as if to show it hurt. ‘No, she … I have a little bed-sit which I rent out … in case I couldn’t afford to…’ She ran her eyes around her flat.

‘And it’s in…?’

‘Sandviken. Up in Hødden.’ She gave me the exact address and I jotted it down.

‘And I’ll find her there?’350

‘She was there last time we spoke, anyway.’