Ole had tried to call me from Solstad. He had wanted to know what I knew about the incident. When I didn’t answer, he turned to Imo. Ole went to his house, because he wanted to ask Imo some questions about Jimmy and Cecilie as well, having discovered the truth about his wife earlier in the day. And that’s when he discovered Johannes’ microphone case. Imo realised that Ole could put both Tobias and him in a lot of trouble, so he decided to put Oskar’s father completely out of the equation. And by bringing me into the frame as well, he thought he’d covered all his bases. That it would all go away.

‘I thought she liked me,’ Tobias said with a soft sob. ‘For real. But she didn’t answer my texts and she didn’t want to talk to me after the show, either, when I went to see her in that room. She was like a wall. Didn’t even want to look me in the eye. That’s when I realised she’d only been acting nice to get what she wanted. She was just like all the others.’

Tobias turned towards me with an angry, sad look on his face. I wondered if I should tell him about Mari’s phone, that she hadn’t answered his texts because it was broken, not necessarily because she didn’t want to.

‘And then I got so angry that I…’

‘…hit her.’ I finished the sentence for him. ‘You hit her first, and then you strangled her.’

Tobias looked away. Then he nodded and took a sharp breath. ‘It all happened so fast I … didn’t realise that…’ His head sank down. ‘I didn’t mean to,’ he said. ‘It was just something that happened.’

I couldn’t move. Not a single muscle.

‘Then Imo came back in and saw what had happened.’ Tobias took another jagged breath. ‘At first he was…’ Tobias shook his head. ‘He tried to bring her back. Did everything he could. He pumped and pumped at her heart and blew into her mouth like a madman. And then Johannes came and…’ Tobias stopped.

For a while I’d thought that Mari had been murdered because she’d discovered something about Dad’s accident, proof that Mum’s version wasn’t true. Perhaps it wasn’t. I still needed to question my Mum about that. But I had realised that what Mari really wanted was to find out as much as possible about her biological father. She may have just wanted to know how he’d died.

‘So what happened after that? After you had both become killers.’

‘Imo … he paced around for a while, thinking. We had to get out of there, but we couldn’t leave through the doors on the first floor. I told him about the newspaper room being open. We went in there and … climbed up onto the roof through the window.’