Later was too late for Synnve Hessel.

The journey home to Sandefjord that same night had been an ordeal.

'Let's sum up what we have,' suggested the police officer, finishing off a bottle of cola.

Synnve Hessel didn't reply. They had already summed things up twice, and it hadn't brought the man any closer to a realistic understanding of the situation.

'After all, you are ...'

He adjusted his gla.s.ses and read: '... a doc.u.mentary film-maker.'

'Producer,' she corrected him.

'Exactly. So you know better than most people what reality looks like.'

'We were supposed to be summing things up.'

'Yes. So. Marianne Kleive was supposed to be going to Wollogo ... Wollongo-'

'Wollongong. A town not far from Sydney. She was going to visit a relative. Celebrate Christmas there.'

'h.e.l.l of a short stay for such a long journey.'

'What?'

'I just mean,' the man said deliberately, 'that if I was going all the way to Australia, I'd stay longer than barely a week.'

'I don't really see what that's got to do with anything.'

'Don't say that. Don't say that. Anyway, she left Sandefjord on Sat.u.r.day 19 December on the train that leaves at-'

'Twelve thirty-eight.'

'Mm. And she was going to meet a friend in Oslo ...'

'Which she did. I checked.'

'Then she spent the night in a hotel before catching the flight to Copenhagen at nine thirty.'

'And she never arrived there.'

'She didn't arrive in Copenhagen?'

'She didn't arrive at Gardermoen. At least, it's possible that she did arrive there, of course, but she wasn't on the flight to Copenhagen. Which naturally means that she didn't fly on to Tokyo or Sydney either.'

The police officer didn't pick up on her sarcasm. He scratched his crotch without embarra.s.sment. Picked up the cola bottle and put it down when he realized it was empty.

'Why didn't you find out about this until last night? Hasn't she got a mobile, this ... your girlfriend?'

'She is not my girlfriend. She is the person I love. The fact is that she's my wife. My spouse, if you like.'

The man's sour expression showed very clearly that he didn't like it at all.

'And as I have already explained several times,' said Synnve, leaning towards him with her mobile in her hand, 'I received three messages over the course of the week. Everything indicated that Marianne was actually in Australia.'

'But you haven't spoken to one another?'

'No. As I said, I tried to ring a couple of times late on Sunday, but I couldn't get through. Last night I tried at least ten times. It goes straight to voicemail, so I a.s.sume the battery is dead.'

'Could I have a look at the messages?'

Synnve brought them up and pa.s.sed him the phone.

'Everything OK. Excitting country. Marianne.'

The man couldn't even read fluently, but made a big thing of the fact that 'exciting' was spelt incorrectly.

'Not particularly ...' he went on, trying to find the right word before he read the next message. 'Not particularly romantic. Having a good time. Marianne.'

He looked at her over the top of his gla.s.ses. The chewing tobacco had formed black crusts at the corners of his mouth, and he constantly sprayed tiny grains into the air.

'Are you two usually so ... concise?'

For the first time, Synnve was lost for words. She didn't know what to say. She knew the question was justified, because it was precisely the unusual brevity, the impersonality in the messages that had made her uneasy. She hadn't given much thought to the first one, which had arrived on the Monday. Marianne might have been in a hurry. Perhaps her great aunt was very demanding. As far as she knew, there could be thousands of reasons why a message didn't arrive or was very brief. On Christmas Eve the message she received said only Merry Christmas, which hurt Synnve deeply. The last message, saying that Marianne was having a good time, neither more nor less, had kept her awake for two nights.

'No,' she said, when the pause began to get embarra.s.sing. 'That's why I don't think she wrote them. She would never have misspelt "exciting".'

The police officer's eyes widened so dramatically that he looked like a clown at some ghastly children's party. Tufts of hair stuck out behind his ears, his mouth was red and moist and his nose resembled an almost round potato.

'So now we have a theeeeeory,' he said, stretching the e for as long as he could. 'Someone has stolen Marianne's mobile and sent the messages in her place!'

'That's not what I'm saying,' she protested, although that was exactly what she was saying. 'Don't you understand that ... that if Marianne has been the victim of a crime and someone ...'

Crime.

'... and someone wanted to make it more difficult to discover-'

'Discover?'

'Yes. That she'd disappeared, I mean. Or that she's ...'

For the second time in twenty-four hours she was close to bursting into tears with someone else looking on.

There was a knock at the door.

'Kvam! They're looking for you on the desk.'

A uniformed man smiled and came into the room. He placed a hand on his somewhat smelly colleague's shoulder and waved towards the door.

'I think it's urgent.'

'I'm in the middle of-'

'I can take over.'

Detective Inspector Kvam got to his feet with a sour expression. He started gathering up the papers in front of him.

'You can leave all that. I'll finish off here. A missing person, isn't it?'

Kvam shrugged his shoulders, gave a farewell nod and headed for the door. It slammed shut behind him.

'Synnve Hessel,' said the new officer. 'It's been a while.'

She half stood up and took the outstretched hand.

'Kjetil? Kjetil ... Berggren?'

'The one and only! I saw you in here and I was a bit ...'

He held out his hand and wiggled it back and forth.

'... concerned when I saw that Ola Kvam was dealing with the report. He isn't ... he's actually retired, but over Christmas we bring in a few people to cover ... Anyway. You know. We all have our own way of doing things. I came as soon as I'd finished what I had to do.'

Kjetil Berggren had been a year below her in school. She wouldn't really have remembered him at all if he hadn't been the school athletics champion. He set a record for the 3,000 metres in Bugrds Park in the very first heat, and was a member of the national junior team before he gained a place at the Police Training Academy straight from high school.

He still looked as if he could run away from just about anybody.

'I have actually followed your career!' He grinned, putting his hands behind his neck and leaning back, tipping his chair. 'Great programmes. Especially that one you did in-'

'You have to help me, Kjetil!'

She thought his pupils grew smaller. Perhaps it was because the sun was suddenly in his eyes as he allowed the chair to drop back, and leaned towards her.

'That's why I'm here. We. The police. To protect and serve, as they say.'

He tried another smile, but she didn't respond to that one either.

'I'm absolutely, totally convinced that something terrible has happened to my partner.'

Kjetil Berggren slowly gathered up the papers in front of him and placed them in a folder, which he pushed to the left on the large desk between them.

'You'd better tell me everything,' he said. 'From the beginning.'

He had understood his father in the beginning.

When the police rang the doorbell of the house in Os on Christmas Eve just as everyone was about to go to bed, Lukas Lysgaard's first thought was for his father. His mother was dead, said the police officer, who seemed genuinely upset at having to deliver the tragic news. They had brought the priest his mother's closest colleague from Fana, but the poor man was in such a state that he just sat in the car while the police took on the heavy burden of telling Lukas Lysgaard that his mother had been murdered three hours earlier.

Lukas had immediately thought about his father.

About his mother, too, of course. He loved his mother. A paralysing grief began to drain away his strength as soon as he grasped what they were telling him. But it was his father that worried him.

Erik Lysgaard was a mild man. Some people found him awkward, while others appreciated his gentle, reserved nature. He didn't make much of an impact outside the family. Or inside it, come to that. He spoke little, but listened all the more. That was why Erik Lysgaard was a man who improved on closer acquaintance. He had his own friends, of course, some childhood friends and a couple of colleagues from the school where he had worked until his back became so twisted that he was granted early retirement on the grounds of ill health.

But above all he was his wife's spouse.

He's nothing alone, was the thought that struck Lukas when he was told that his mother was dead. My father is nothing without my mother.

And in the beginning he had understood him.

That night, that holy, terrible night that Lukas would never forget as long as he lived, the police had driven him to Nubbebakken. The older of the two officers had asked if they wanted company until daylight.

Neither Lukas nor his father wanted anyone there.

His father had shrivelled up into something that was hard to recognize. He was so thin and bent that he hardly even cast a shadow when he opened the door to his son, and without a word turned his back on him and went back into the living room.

The way he cried was terrifying. He cried for a long time, almost silently, then he would emit a low, long-drawn-out howl, without any tears, an animalistic pain that frightened Lukas. He felt more helpless than he had expected, particularly when his father refused all physical contact. Nor did he want to talk. As the day gradually came, a dark Christmas morning heavy with rain, Erik had finally agreed to try and get some sleep. Even then he refused to let his son help him, despite the fact that every single night for more than ten years Eva Karin had taken off her husband's socks and helped him into bed, then rubbed his bad back with a home-made ointment sent by a faithful parishioner from their years in Stavanger.

But Lukas had understood him.

Now it was starting to get rather wearing.

It was five days since the murder, and nothing had changed. His father had literally eaten nothing during those five days. He was quite prepared to drink water lots of water and a couple of cups of coffee with sugar and milk in the afternoon. Lukas brought him to his own house in the hope that the grandchildren would at least arouse some spark of life in the old man, but Erik still refused to eat. The visit had been a complete disaster. The children were scared stiff at the sight of their grandfather crying in such a peculiar way, and the eldest, at eight years old, already had his hands full trying to deal with the knowledge that Grandma was never, ever coming back.

'This won't do, Dad.'

Lukas pulled a footstool over to his father's armchair and sat down on it.

'We need to think about the funeral. You have to eat. You're a shadow of yourself, Dad, and we can't go on like this.'

'We can't have the funeral until the police give their permission,' said his father.

Even his voice was thinner.

'No, but we need to do some planning.'

'You can do that.'

'That wouldn't be right, Dad. We have to do it together.'

Silence.

The old grandfather clock had stopped. Erik Lysgaard had given up winding the heavy bra.s.s weights below the clock face each night before he went to bed. He no longer needed to hear the pa.s.sing of time.

Dust motes drifted in the light from the window.

'You have to eat, Dad.'