I was listening to what people were saying. They thought I was asleep.

And now that everyone had been taken care of and fed, when there wasn’t much more to say about where exactly they had been on the train when the crash happened, and glasses of red wine and beer had started to appear, most people were more interested in where on earth Mette-Marit had got to.

The rumour had already been circulating on the train. Two middle-aged women just behind me had talked about virtually nothing else. There was an extra carriage, they whispered. The last carriage looked different from the rest of the train, and this wasn’t the way the normal morning train to Bergen looked at all. What’s more, the far end of the platform had been cordoned off. It had to be the Royal Carriage. True, it didn’t look particularly royal, but there was no way of knowing how it was equipped inside, and besides it was widely known that Mette-Marit was scared of flying. It could be Sonja, of course, she adores the mountains, I mean everybody knows that, but on the other hand she wouldn’t be leaving home right now, just before the King’s seventieth birthday.

I breathed a huge sigh of relief when the two ladies got off at Hønefoss.

I rejoiced too soon.

The gossip had caught on, and was well on the way to becoming the truth. Strangers were chatting to each other. The train became less and less Norwegian as it climbed towards the high mountains. People were sharing their sandwiches and fetching coffee for each other. One person thought they knew something they had heard from someone they knew, and a girl of about twenty-five had definitely heard that somebody she went to school with who now worked in the royal protection team was actually going to Bergen this week.