‘I don’t know,’ Yngve said. ‘That’s what I’d like to find out. And I’d like to question her again about the car accident, too. Is there any way she could have had a motive for killing Mari? Mari was going to write a piece about the car accident, but that isn’t something you would kill three teenagers over. Unless, of course, Mari had discovered something that wasn’t uncovered ten years ago. Something that suggests Susanne lied to us. I find it very hard to believe that Mari had, though.’

‘Why?’ Hanstveit asked.

‘She wasn’t privy to a single piece of physical evidence, for one. It’s not my impression that she’d talked to Susanne about the accident, or even talked that much to her at all – even though Mari was going out with her son.’

The room went quiet for a moment.

‘I’ll head over to her house after this meeting,’ Yngve said. ‘In the meantime, let’s look at other possible motives as well. Let’s hear them all. There are no stupid ideas. No silly thoughts.’ Yngve searched the room with his eyes. ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘There must have been something that has struck you as odd or weird.’

‘Maybe someone else had a thing for Mari,’ one of the detectives suggested – a woman with long, fair hair. ‘Maybe they thought that Mari was on the market again after her break-up with Even, which apparently was done very publicly. But she refused them and they reacted angrily.’

Yngve thought about it. ‘That would suggest that someone had time to make a move on her in the few minutes it took Johannes Eklund to leave the music room, go downstairs with his friends, realise that he’d misplaced his phone, and then come back up again. I don’t think that would have taken him very long.’

‘There are people like that,’ she argued, ‘who get straight to the point. Without any fuss.’

Again the room went quiet. No one seemed to support her suggestion.

‘Alright,’ Yngve said. ‘Let us move away from the motive a little.’

He asked if they had managed to identify the man who had entered the school by the main door at 10.49 p.m., and who hadn’t come back out the same way.

‘I talked to the group of girls who were standing outside at the time,’ another detective said. ‘They hadn’t noticed him.’

Yngve thought of Mari’s father, who he still hadn’t managed to get hold of. His absence from the town – from his wife’s side just after their daughter had been killed – was beginning to look more and more suspicious.

‘What about Børre Halvorsen’s movements between the show and his murder. Do we know what he was up to, besides not going to school?’

‘I spoke to his father earlier,’ Therese said. ‘He had no idea where Børre had been.’