“No. Well, a few of my fellow students went on to specialise in that field, but none of them is in the top league. Yet.”

“Do you often see them?”

“No, only when I meet them by chance.”

That was true. And a sore point. Karen Borg didn’t have many friends now. They had slipped out of her life one after another, or she out of theirs, on paths that had become overgrown, only crossing now and again as polite exchanges over a beer in a pavement café in the spring, or emerging from a cinema late on an autumn evening.

“Good. Then I want to have you. They can charge me with the murder, and I’ll be remanded in custody. But you must get the police to guarantee me one thing: to let me stay here in police headquarters. Anything to keep away from that bloody prison.”

The man was certainly full of surprises.

The disgraceful conditions in the cells at police headquarters had hit the headlines from time to time in the newspapers, and with reason. The cells were intended for twenty-four-hour remand. They were scarcely even adequate for that. Yet they were where this prisoner wanted to stay. For weeks.

“Why?”

The young man bent forward confidentially. She could smell his breath, now rancid after several days without a toothbrush, and leant back in her own chair.

“I can’t trust anyone. I have to think. We can talk again when I’ve worked some things out. You will come back?”

He was intense, verging on desperation, and for the first time she almost felt sorry for him.

She rang the number Håkon had written on a piece of paper.

“We’ve finished. You can come and fetch us.”

Karen Borg didn’t have to go to court, to her great relief. She had only once attended a court hearing. It was while she was still a student, and convinced she would use her law degree to help the needy. She had sat herself on the public benches in Room 17, behind a barrier which seemed to be there to protect innocent observers from the brutal reality in the room.