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26

I walked past the officer in the hall and, behaving as if I had a passe-partout, took the lift to Kripos and knocked on the closed door of Vegard Vadheim’s office.

An indefinable sound from within reached my ears, and after a moment I knocked again.

‘Come in,’ I heard this time, loud and clear.

I opened the door.

Vadheim was alone. He was sitting at the desk, partly obscured by a formidable pile of documents, writing furiously. I had seen him like this before: head down, arms pumping, in long-distance races.

He barely had time to look up, but when he saw who it was, he straightened his back, put down his biro and said, not without a certain tartness in his tone: ‘Come in, Veum. I hadn’t expected to see you again so soon.’

I closed the door behind me.

He consulted his watch. ‘Not for a couple of hours anyway,’ he continued. He arched his eyebrows and leaned across his desk with a devilish but not unfriendly expression on his face.

There was something eternal and constant about Vegård Vadheim. He was one of life’s indefatigable marathon runners, keeping up an even pace, according to a timetable he had set down in detail long before the race had started. At the tape he would have left all of us behind.

I mumbled, ‘There was something I forgot to mention the last time I was here.’194

‘You don’t say. Something you omitted to … mention. And what would that be?’

‘I don’t know if you’re aware,’ I started, with a tiny strategic evasion, ‘but of the four musicians who constituted The Harpers, there’s only one left. Jakob Aasen. The other three are dead, and none of them had what one might call a … natural death.’

He crossed his arms. ‘Really? Let me hear what you have to say about that.’

‘You know … These are kind of my childhood pals. Well, not really, I suppose, but Jakob Aasen was. And Johnny Solheim lived in the same street as I did. The other two were in the class below us and lived in Verftet, but I knew who they were. Because of Jakob I followed The Harpers closely for a few years.’

He leaned forward again with his forearms on the desk. ‘Interesting, Veum. That’s handy to know.’

‘You know yourself how Johnny died.’

‘Yes, Veum, I do.’

The irony bounced off me like talk of relegation on an FC Brann fan. ‘Listen, the other two: the first, Harry Kløve, the bass guitarist, was killed on a zebra crossing when the pedestrian lights were on red in autumn last year.’

He angled his head and nodded. ‘I see. A traffic accident, in other words?’

‘Maybe, maybe not. If you take the full context. I mean traffic accidents are not always how they appear. If you’re waiting to cross the road and there are lots of people around you … then along comes a bus and as it reaches the pedestrian crossing someone thumps you in the back and you involuntarily step forward. That’s not impossible, is it?’