‘Like you, you mean? You keep whiskey and protein powder in your basement, too, do you?’

‘I wish. But if his wife is to be believed, he sold most of it. And didn’t Brodal say the state of his liver could have been caused by steroids as well? Or a mix of the two?’

Karen nods.

‘Unfortunately, we’re not getting those results until next week. But the technicians didn’t find any growth hormones in the house, for what that’s worth. On the other hand, it’s probably irrelevant for our purposes. I’m more interested in how Gabriel was trying to con everyone around him than how he treated his body. Ready to do the rest of the house?’

They lock the basement door and walk up the stairs without any great expectations. The walkthrough of the Stuub house seems likely to prove as futile as Sören Larsen had warned it would be.

‘Three bedrooms upstairs, living room and a small office behind the kitchen,’ he’d said. ‘There’s a desk with some papers in it, but I have a hard time imagining any of it is particularly interesting. To be honest, it mostly looked like pay stubs and bills, but I leave it to you to find out.’

And he had been right. The house may have looked odd among the traditional Noorö houses surrounding it, but aside from that, Karen is forced to conclude as she walks from room to room with Karl, it’s an ordinary home with no signs of illegal activities. A bedroom each for the children and a larger bedroom of which Gabriel had, by all appearances, been the only occupant for the past two months.

The centrepieces of the room Sören Larsen had described as an office are a sewing machine, a computer monitor and a printer, all sitting on a sizeable desk. Baskets of yarn and sewing implements, remnants of children’s fabrics and binders full of sewing patterns line a long shelf on the opposite wall. Carefully organised personal papers such as pay stubs from Groth’s and the accountancy firm where Katja had started working part-time two years ago, mortgage statements and a few household bills are all neatly filed away in clearly labelled hanging folders. Either Gabriel was far more fastidious than he came across, or this is Katja Stuub’s work, Karen thinks and pushes the last drawer shut.

She’s not going to bother to look for a concealment; the oversight in Fredrik Stuub’s house has prompted Larsen to force his team to scour every square inch of the house for hidden compartments. Besides, Gabriel’s computer had been sitting in plain sight on the desk, next to the sewing machine.

‘Computer games,’ Larsen had summed up his verdict. ‘A lot of pirated ones, from the looks of it.’

‘Surely there must have been other things?’