We met regularly after that, and she always burned in my loins like a low sun, but although five years had passed since our first kiss, we had never managed to quench the thirst the sun always produced in us when we met.

‘Who are you going to see?’ she asked.

‘Arild Sletten.’

She looked at me in surprise. ‘Have you become a rock ‘n’ roll fan in your later youth, Varg?’

I shook my head. ‘I’m working on a case that involves an old rock band. ‘And you?’

‘I still prefer the Bergen Philharmonic.’

‘Now, I meant. What job are you working on at the moment?’

She pondered. ‘What might be of most interest to you is a collective for former junkies on the Lindås peninsula. Some idealists have done a decent job. I’m going up there in a few days to do a splash on it.’ Now she was serious.

‘Sounds great.’ I got up. ‘Sorry, Laila, but Sletten’s waiting for me, so … I’ll pop by on my way out, OK?’

‘If I’m here.’ She looked a little disconcerted for a moment. Then she flashed her big smile again. ‘Anyway, it was lovely to see you, Varg. Come back soon…’ She gave me another hug before I said my goodbyes and made my way to Sletten’s office.178

The big newspaper houses were quiet now. The printing press had moved to other premises, journalists wrote on quiet keyboards in front of upright word-processing screens, manuscripts travelled through the system on floppy discs and Tipp-Ex was a relic of the past.

I found Arild Sletten in his recording studio, wearing gigantic headphones, listening to a CD player on his desk, his legs splayed over the back of a chair, holding a notepad and chewing reflectively on a pencil.

Arild Sletten resembled an urban cowboy, but then he did come from the C&W county of Sogn og Fjordane, where most of the populated areas look like they are in the Rockies, are sponsored by McDonalds and refuse to accept payment with anything but American Express.

He was clad in denim – a blue stone-washed jacket and jeans – wore a brightly coloured shirt and had Texas bling around his neck, and on his feet he wore brown, patterned-leather cowboy boots.

His hair was long and greasy, combed back in Elvis style with sideburns the size of a horse’s blinkers. His face was tanned, as if he had just returned from a short stay in Las Vegas or he had spent the majority of his free-time in a solarium. The way he moved suggested he spent the rest in a fitness centre working overtime on the heaviest weights. He walked like a cattle stockman, stiff-kneed, and as bandy-legged as a cactus. But as soon as he opened his mouth he was unable to hide the fact that he came from Florø with a dialect that lay halfway between Bergen and Ålesund, sea salt in the diphthongs and sheep pasture in the longest vowels.