‘And your Rebecca was with them?’

‘Mhm.’

‘While you were at home looking after the children?’

‘Mhm.’

‘And what about all the other days?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘All the Fridays and Saturdays you were out gigging with The Harpers?’

‘Yes?’

‘Then she was at home looking after the children?’163

‘Yes. So?’

‘No, nothing. I just don’t quite understand what you’re so angry about.’

‘Well, drop it then. How did it go with your marriage, Varg? Didn’t it finish as well, sometime in the seventies?’

I nodded slowly. ‘It was a hard decade for marriages.’

‘You’re telling me, Varg. You’re telling me.’

We stood looking at each other as the long shadows from the seventies settled over our faces like zebra stripes.

Then I held up the sheet with the three names and addresses on. ‘OK. I’ll see if she’s at one of these places. I’ll let you know whichever way it goes. Are you at home tonight?’

He gave a faint smile. ‘Still looking after the kids.’

Before I was out of the church the organ was roaring again: a desperate, disharmonious sound until he pulled himself together and started on a frenetic postlude. Unless it was a requiem to the seventies.

164

22

I left the car by a parking meter in Strømgaten, paid the fee for two hours and strolled into Fosswinckelsgate.

The address Jakob had written down turned out to be a three-storey house on the slope between the Freemasons’ seventies bunker and the natural-sciences building; it was attractively set back, and was fronted by a small garden with a paved pathway down the middle.

I walked up the long path and tried the door. It was locked. To the right there were three bells with names and intercoms. The middle one belonged to Helga Bøe, but neither she nor anyone else was in. At any rate no one answered.

I crossed the street and looked up at the house like a cat burglar casing the joint. The building was in good order, recently painted grey, with blue window frames and doors, and the heavily curtained windows were slumbering in the morning darkness. They didn’t so much as open an eyelid.

I walked on a few blocks and crossed the dirty stream of cars in Nygårdsgaten. I found a building that with some charity might be regarded as having once been off-yellow, but now was definitely more off than yellow. There seemed to be quite a lot of bed-sits here, but I was out of luck. No one called Unn Helene lived here and the people I spoke to found it hard enough remembering who had been living there the previous month, never mind in the seventies. Hello and goodbye.

I walked up Strømgaten again and calculated I had donated 165the parking-meter company an hour of my time. Then I drove to Olsvik.

My map led me to the right street. But the little, white timber construction that might have been there in the seventies was gone now, replaced by a row of terraced houses, complete with tricycles in front, leaking roofs and panoramic windows with a view of the Vadmyra residential district and adjoining splendours.