This time, he doesn’t even respond. The straight stretch of road Karl is referring to ends in another sharp bend less than a hundred feet from where it began. Taking no notice of the lights from the oncoming car that vindicate Thorstein Byle’s caution, Karl curses himself for having climbed into his colleague’s car instead of getting his own. It has already taken them almost forty-five minutes to cover a distance that under normal circumstances wouldn’t have taken half that. At least not with sirens on. They’re not even using their hazard lights. Byle turned them off the moment the road began to meander, making overtaking impossible. There’s no point adding stress to an already hazardous traffic situation, he had reasoned.

‘Calm down, lad,’ he’d added. ‘Better to get there safely than not at all.’

Karl glances over at the mirror and reluctantly concludes that Byle might be right. There is a police car with its disco lights on ahead of them and another behind, both unable to gain so much as an inch of ground on the narrow road. The patrol that had been near Gudheim when the call went out had probably adopted the same puppy-like enthusiasm, and with lights flashing and sirens wailing, they’d skidded into a ditch before they’d made it two miles. ‘No injuries, but it’s going to take us a while to pull the car out,’ dispatch had informed them. Three cars remain, two men in each, and Cornelis Loots, whose personal vehicle had been parked outside the police station and who had consequently been able to set off slightly earlier than the rest of them. He’s probably just a few hundred yards up the road, Karl thinks darkly.

The question is: where is William Tryste?

It had taken them eight precious minutes to get enough out of Helena Tryste to convince them they should direct all available units to Tryste’s residence north of Skreby. They had been unsure how to interpret her disjointed words and incomplete sentences like ‘borrowed Alvin’s phone’, ‘barrels from after the war’, ‘didn’t use to belong to the Groths’. But the rest had been crystal clear.

‘He’s going to kill her. As soon as I call, he’s going to kill her.’

Karl still has no idea how she managed it, but somehow, Karen Eiken Hornby has apparently figured out that William Tryste committed both murders and now she’s locked up in Tryste’s home. That had been enough to send all available units to The Complex.