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people had walked right past the missing person several times. Anders Joner was there. As he had not lived in Glassverket for the last eight years, few people knew him and he was grateful for the anonymity it gave him. His brothers, Tore and Kristian, were there too, as was Helga’s nephew, Tomme.
    Everyone felt a huge sense of relief when they finally started to walk. One hundred and fifty people dissolved into smaller groups and shuffled out of the school playground. There was a low murmuring of voices. This was a bizarre experience for most of them. Staring into the ground all the time, seeing every straw, every root and twig, every 41
    irregularity in the tarmac, the litter along the verges, there was so much to see. The group which had been ordered to search along the riverbanks kept looking furtively into the rapidly flowing water. They lifted up bushes and other shrubs with low-hanging branches. They searched holes and caves. And they did find things. A rusty old pram. A decaying wellington boot. There were mainly empty beer bottles along the riverbank. From time to time they would stop for a short break. One of the groups came across a small shed. It was tilting dangerously. It looked like it might collapse at any moment. A good hiding place, they thought as they stood facing the simple building. Not very far from the road, or the house where Ida lived either. Instinctively they sniffed the air. A man crouched down and crept through the opening, which consisted of a narrow gap in the dilapidated planks. He asked for a torch and was handed one. The beam flickered across the dark space. His heart was beating so fast he could feel it in his temples. The rest of the group waited. Not a sound came from the inside of the shed during these long, tense seconds. Then the man’s feet emerged again as he crept backwards out of the tight opening.
    ‘Nothing but old rubbish,’ he reported.
    ‘You did lift stuff up, didn’t you?’ someone asked.
    ‘She could be lying under something. Underneath planks and things like that.’
    ‘She wasn’t there,’ the man replied, and rubbed his face wearily.
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    ‘They did say it was very easy to overlook something. Why don’t we double-check?’ The other man was not going to let it go.
    The man who had crawled inside the damp
    darkness to look for the body of a dead girl and had not found her gave him a hostile look.
    ‘Are you saying I didn’t look properly?’ he said.
    ‘No, no. Don’t get me wrong. I just want to be sure. We don’t want to be the group that walked right past her, do we? We want to do this the right way.’
    The first man nodded in agreement. The other man crept through the opening and carefully shone the torch around. He was hoping so desperately that he would find her. Fancy hoping like this, it struck him, as he knelt on the musty ground, feeling the cold seep through the knees of his trousers. Hoping that she would be lying there. Because if she was lying in there, she would have to be dead. But we don’t want her to be dead. We’re just being realistic. We are helping. He backed out.
    ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Thank God.’
    He exhaled deeply. The group moved on.
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CHAPTER 4
    Willy Oterhals had not been out looking for Ida. He was sitting on the floor of his garage with a book in his lap. The chill from the concrete floor crept through the seat of his trousers. Tomme was sitting on a workbench by the wall watching Willy. His clothes were damp after several hours of being outside in the drizzling rain. The search had yielded no results. Now he was looking at the Opel. From the bench where he was sitting he could not see the damaged wing. He could make himself believe that it had never happened, that it was all a bad dream.
    ‘Up the ridge, was it?’ Willy said without looking up at him.
    Tomme thought about it for a while. ‘It was horrible,’ he said. ‘Just walking around searching like that. Loads of people had turned up. They’re