‘A man of the mountains,’ said Dr Streng contentedly before taking his eyes off him. ‘And this wound looks fantastic. You’ve been lucky. A good dose of antibiotics just to be on the safe side, and you’ll be fine.’

I sat up. It took him only a few seconds to bandage my thigh.

‘We really have been lucky,’ he said, tucking his spectacles back in his pocket. ‘This could have gone very badly indeed.’

I wasn’t sure whether he meant my injury, or the accident itself. He brushed the palms of his hands against each other as if I had been covered in dust. Then he waddled off to the next patient, a terrified eight-year-old boy with his arm in a temporary sling. As I tried to haul myself over to the reception desk in order to find some support for my back, a man positioned himself in the middle of the floor in the big room, his legs spread wide apart. He hesitated for a moment, then used a chair to help him jump up on top of the five- or six-metre-long rough table that was standing by the windows facing south-west. Since he was several kilos overweight, he almost fell off. When he had regained his balance, I realized who he was. Around his neck he was wearing a red and white Brann football club scarf.

‘My dear friends,’ he said in a voice that suggested he was used to speaking to large groups of people, ‘we have all suffered an extremely traumatic experience!’

He sounded absolutely delighted.

‘Needless to say, our thoughts go out to Einar Holter’s family, first and foremost. Einar was driving our train today. I didn’t know him, but I have already been told that he was a family man, a much loved -’

‘His family hasn’t yet been informed about the accident,’ a woman’s voice interrupted loudly from the other side of the room.