‘Oskar who?’

I think about how to answer for a few seconds. ‘Oskar is one of my best friends,’ I say. ‘Has been ever since we were little. I asked him if he knew what had happened. He said he didn’t, so I went and asked Tic-Tac.’

‘Tic-Tac, the janitor?’

‘Yes. He was sitting by the police car, smoking. He … he told me that Mari and Johannes were dead.’

‘How did Tic-Tac seem to you – when he told you this?’

‘You mean what was he like?’

‘That’s what I mean, yes.’

‘Shocked, I think, more than anything. Like he didn’t know where he was or what he was doing. I guess we were all like that. He smoked kind of nervously. Like all the time.’

The prosecutor nods sceptically. ‘Then what did you do?’ she continues.

‘I went home. Well, I ran.’

‘You ran all the way home? In the rain?’

‘It’s really not that far.’

‘You weren’t nervous that people might think you were running away from the crime scene? Why didn’t you take your bike? You’d arrived on it, hadn’t you?’

‘I didn’t know what I was thinking at that moment.’

‘Is that something that happens to you a lot?’

I frown. I don’t know what she means.

‘It sounds as if you almost blacked out…’

‘No, I didn’t,’ I reply. ‘I don’t think I did. But I was upset. I just had to get out of there.’

‘To be by yourself.’

‘Yes … something like that.’

‘So you didn’t think that everybody was looking at you the way they did because they thought you might have killed Johannes and Mari?’

‘No. Not then.’

‘But you thought so later?’

‘Yeah, it … it sort of crept into my mind quite quickly after.’

‘Why was that?’

I sigh heavily. ‘Fredheim is a small town,’ I say. ‘News travels fast.’

8

THEN

When my uncle knocked on the door, I was lying on my bed, staring at the wall. I could tell it was him – he always rapped on the door three times, short pauses between each knock. The final one always harder than the first two.

He opened the door before I’d had a chance to say ‘come in’. I just kept staring at the wall.

‘Hey champ,’ Imo said. Then sighed.

I took a deep breath and released it slowly through my nose. My uncle didn’t close the door behind him. He just stood there in the middle of the room. I could feel his eyes on me.

‘I went down to the school as soon as I heard,’ he said. ‘But I couldn’t find you. I guessed you’d come back here.’