“And it’s full out the back; you’d better make your round as soon as you can,” she added.

He took the keys, fumbling as he attached them to his belt. The cashbox contained what it should. The number of passport forms was also correct. The log was up to date.

Formalities completed, he decided to go and collect some fines straight away, now that Sunday morning had laid its cold but calming hand on last night’s revellers. Before going, he flipped through the papers on the desk. He’d heard about the murder on the radio news bulletin. A badly mutilated body had been discovered down by the River Aker. The police had no leads. Empty words, he’d thought. The police always have some leads, it’s just that they’re all too often very scanty.

The photo file from the scene-of-crime people hadn’t been added yet, of course. But there were a few Polaroids lying loose in the green folder. They were grotesque enough. Håkon never got used to photographs of the dead. He’d seen plenty of them in his five years in the force, the last three attached to Homicide, A.2.11. All suspicious deaths were reported to the police, and entered on the computer under the code “susp.” Suspicious death was a broad concept. He’d seen bodies that were burnt, deaths from exhaust fumes, stab wounds, bullets, drowning, or torture. Even the tragic elderly folk who were only victims of the crime of neglect, found when a neighbour in the flat below noticed an unpleasant odour in the dining room, looked up and saw a damp patch on the ceiling, and rang the police in indignation at the damage-even those poor devils were input as “susp” and had the dubious honour of having their final photographs taken postmortem. Håkon had seen green corpses, blue corpses, red, yellow, and multicoloured corpses, and the pretty pink carbon monoxide bodies whose souls had been able to endure no more of this world’s vale of tears.