I hastened away so as not to run into Muus. On the stairs going down it struck me that actually there was something I had omitted to mention: the fact that of the four men who had constituted The Harpers rock band from 1958 to 1975 only one was still alive – Jakob Aasen.

The other three were dead and not one of them had died of old age.

151

20

On the terrace in front of the police station I stopped for a second and mused.

There were tiny specks of frost in the air: snow that hadn’t materialised yet. A large, yellow articulated bus fitted with the characteristic braces that trolley-buses used glided through Allehelgensgate like an oversized caterpillar. People passed the police station with eyes lowered as if frightened that they might be summoned inside.

I walked down to a branch of my bank in Korskirkealmenningen, inserted my card in the ATM and crossed my fingers I wouldn’t be leaving empty-handed. It worked. I stuffed the five apparently new hundred-krone notes in my wallet and hurried away before anyone could recognise me.

On the corner between Korskirkealmenningen and Hollendergaten three or four people were standing in silent prayer around a bottle of lager; I was unable to imagine anything colder than beer right now.

Then, with a stab to the heart, I recognised two of them – fossils from my prehistoric period. They had once been children in Nordnes, but fate had dealt them a harsher hand than me.

Kaggen noticed me at roughly the same moment, mumbled a few words to Lisbeth and hobbled towards me. Lisbeth followed him across the pavement, eyes lowered, but then stopped with an expression like that of a superannuated 152Egyptian priestess. Her dark hair now had unkempt stripes of grey, and she was no longer the sad beauty she had been in her best years.

‘Hi, Varg,’ Kaggen said in a gruff voice, hobbling up to me, grabbing me by the lapels and holding on as if he needed the support.

He was still no taller than one metre sixty, as though his growth had been stunted. Once he had been the fastest centre-forward in town and the most promising junior Nordnes Sports Club had ever had. He played in the first team as a sixteen-year-old and it was rumoured talent scouts from Brann FC had already been after him. In fact, his name was Karl Gerhard, but he was always called Kaggen.

He never got to play for Brann though and his sojourn with the Nordnes Sports Club first team was brief. He dribbled more in the pub than on the pitch, put on twelve kilos in the autumn season, sat on the bench for the first spring months and went to sea in June. There he didn’t even get into the ship’s team and returned home, blacklisted, three or four years later. Since then he had been walking in ever decreasing circles around the Inner Mission hostel in Hollendergaten.