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dilapidated planks. He asked for a flashlight 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 backward out of the tight opening.
    "Nothing but old garbage," 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.
    "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 flashlight around. He was hoping so desperately that he would find her. Imagine 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 loudly. The group moved on.

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 fender. 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 looking everywhere. Including wells and rivers."
    "Will they be searching tomorrow?" Willy asked.
    "They're saying they'll go on like this for days."
    He looked across to his older friend. Willy was quite skinny, he thought. He had a lean face with a protruding chin, and bony shoulders. His knees were sharp underneath the nylon coverall. Now he was rubbing some dirt off his cheek with his finger, while trying to decipher the text and illustrations in the book about car repairs. The book was old and dog-eared. The pages were stained with oil. Some of them were torn and someone had tried to fix them with sticky tape. He studied the illustration of a fender, the right-hand one, as on Tomme's Opel.
    "First we need to sand it," Willy said decisively. "We need two types of sandpaper, smooth and coarse." He peered down at the book. "Number 180 and number 360. The fender needs sanding down first with dry paper and then with wet. We'll need a sanding block and some filler. Rust remover. A degreasing agent. You listening to me, Tomme?"
    Tomme nodded. But the truth was that he was far, far away.
    Willy read on. "We need to sand around the dent. It says here: 'Start in the middle of the damaged area and work your way outward in circular movements.' Find something to write on. You'll have to go out and buy the stuff we need. Once we've got the fender off."
    "I don't mind doing the shopping," Tomme said. "But I'm broke."
    Willy looked up at him. "I'll lend you the money. You won't be going to school forever, will you? Sooner or later you'll start earning." Once more he