‘Yes?’ she snapped. ‘What is it now?’

‘May I come in?’

She looked past me, to see if anyone else was with me, or whether the neighbours were following what was going on. ‘What’s this all about?’

I decided not to beat about the bush. ‘You’ve heard that Ruth has been arrested, I take it?’

Her face went ashen. ‘N-no?’ She stepped to the side and let me in. ‘What for?’ she asked as I passed. ‘Drugs again? And there was me thinking…’

We paused in the narrow hallway. The smell of baking was stronger now. And the smell of liqueur weaker.

‘No,’ I said. ‘She was arrested for the murder of your husband.’

‘Ruth? Johnny? That isn’t possible…’

‘Won’t you sit down? Isn’t it time to lay all your cards on the table?’

She nodded and went to open the door to the same basement room as last time. She switched on the dazzling light and plumped down on one of the chairs. It was a cold room. It reminded me of a mortuary.

‘Are you alone?’378

She nodded. ‘Sissel’s with the priest.’

‘With Berge Brevik?’

She looked up. ‘Yes?’

‘On a Monday? Is that normal?’

She cast helplessly around her. ‘I don’t know. She just said as she was leaving that she was going to see him. Why do you ask? Is there anything up with Brevik?’

I said casually: ‘No, no, no. Has she been gone long?’

‘Half an hour. Tell me about Ruth. When was she…?’

‘Arrested? Last night. At her bed-sit. She’d been in Bergen for several weeks.’

‘Several weeks? And there was me…’

‘Trying to forget that she even existed?’

‘That wasn’t what I was going to say.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me she was Jakob’s daughter?’

Her expression was flat and bitter. ‘Who…? That’s none of anyone’s … What’s it got to do with the case?’

‘Quite a lot it turns out. I asked you before what your relationship with Jakob was.’

‘“Was” is right. Once upon a time … a hundred years ago. In nineteen … sixty-one. What’s that got to do with any of this? It was just something that happened. A falling star.’ She made a fluttering motion with one hand. ‘Like that. And then it was gone.’ She moved her hands apart to indicate an empty horizon. Not a ship in sight. Not so much as a distant sail.

‘But this falling star … produced a very tangible result?’

She hissed: ‘You don’t understand anything. You don’t remember me … as I was.’

‘Oh no?’

She sent me a pacified look. ‘Do you?’

‘Who can ever forget…?’379

She looked at me with a resigned air. ‘Anyway I wasn’t … like this.’ Her eloquent hands ran down her shapeless figure. ‘I was curvy – everywhere – and the boys in the street couldn’t get enough of me. That’s the truth.’

‘I know. I remember.’

‘Both Johnny and Jakob were after me. I think I was a kind of trophy they were competing for. And Johnny won, he thought. But that was because Jakob had withdrawn. Because it was Jakob I … And little did he, Johnny, know when he was sleeping with me and enjoying the fruits of his victory that Jakob had tasted them first. It was just like that Danish song: “It was in Fredriksberg, it was May, I fell in love with…”’