‘Do you know what he does? When he’s not singing, I mean.’

‘He started out as a mechanic. When we played together he worked on cars. He could do up American models like no one else this side of the Langfjell mountains. Then he got it into his head that he should go into “advertising”, in inverted commas. Making badges and stencils, stickers for car windows and those funny signs people hang in their bars and you don’t laugh at until you’re so pissed you can barely read them. For a couple of years he recorded some promo videos, singing cover songs on them. Last I heard, he’d invested some money in a video shop.’

‘Rentals?’

‘Mhm. But I haven’t a clue where. You are a detective, aren’t you?’

I grinned. ‘Yes, Jakob, I am. Now, we detectives usually ask this … You haven’t got an up-to-date photo of her, have you?’

‘You remember her, Varg! You’ll easily recognise her.’

‘I haven’t seen her for … Besides it’s not for my own purposes. If I’m going to make discreet enquiries, I…’

‘OK, OK.’ He got up and left the kitchen. Soon afterwards he was back with an envelope containing some small colour snaps. ‘These from last summer are the most up-to-date. Here … I took this one on Mount Fløien in October. That’s the most recent. That’s more or less what she looks like today.’70

He handed me the photo and I stared at him for a few long seconds, then concentrated on the photograph.

I hadn’t repressed it. I had just stopped thinking about it.

Nevertheless it came as a shock when I saw her in the small amateur photograph. As if I hadn’t known all along. That it was Jakob who had married Rebecca.

71

10

I found Johnny Solheim where you find most people. In the telephone directory. Like so many other ex-Nordnes residents he hadn’t moved out of sight of ‘home’. In his case, that meant he lived in a flat from the early fifties, on the mountainside above the old U-boat bunkers in Laksevåg. The building was split vertically with two flats on either side, and a basement flat below.

I found his name on the postbox by the garden gate. On my way up the gravel path leading to the entrance at the back of the building I glanced down at the immense concrete walls of the U-boat pens, which still gaped like hulking memorials of the Germanic race’s building skills. It was impossible to see them without thinking of the sixty children at Holen Folkeskole who were killed when the British bombers attacked the U-boat base in October 1944. Sixty children who never had the chance to grow up, sixty lives brought to an abrupt end with no more warning than the sudden wail of an air-raid siren.

On the other side of Pudde fjord, the part of the Nordnes peninsula that had been spared the war and the post-war rebuilding looked strangely uninhabited. From the culture house in Verftet and beyond, buildings were few and far between, and now, in December, the south-facing slope above the public sea-pool was deserted and the green bath-house buildings were abandoned, with hardly a pair of forgotten swimming trunks to be seen.