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panic broke out in Oslo. But greed is like meltwater: when one channel gets blocked it simply finds a new one. The Fisherman—who was many things, but first and foremost a businessman—put it like this: demand that isn’t being met demands to be met. He was a jovial, fat man with a walrus moustache who made youthink of Santa Claus, until it suited him to slash you with a Stanley knife. He’d spent a few years smuggling Russian vodka that was shipped out on Soviet fishing boats, transferred to Norwegian fishing boats in the Barents Sea, then unloaded at an abandoned fishing station that the Fisherman not only ran, but owned, lock, stock and barrel. There the bottles were loaded into fish crates and driven down to the capital in fish vans. There was fish in them as well. In Oslo the bottles were stored in the cellar of the Fisherman’s shop, which was no fake front but a fishmonger’s that had been in the Fisherman’s family for three generations without ever being particularly profitable, but without going under either.
    And when the Russians wondered if he could imagine swapping the vodka for heroin, the Fisherman did some calculations, looked at the legal penalties, looked at the risk of getting caught, then went for it. So, when Daniel Hoffmann started up his Svalbard trade again, he realised that he had competition. And he didn’t like that at all.
    And that was where I came into the picture.
    By that time—as I think I’ve already made clear—I had a more-or-less failed criminal career behind me. I’d done time for bank robbery, worked for and got fired by Hoffmann as an assistant pimp to Pine, and was on the lookout for something vaguely useful to do. Hoffmann contacted me again because he’d heard from reliable sources that I had fixed a smuggler who was found in the harbour at Halden with his head only partially intact. A very professional contract killing, Hoffmann declared. And seeing as I had no better reputation at my disposal, I didn’t deny it.
    The first job was a man from Bergen who worked as a dealer for Hoffmann, but had stolen some of the goods, denied it, and had gone to work for the Fisherman instead. He was easy to track down: people from the west talk louder than other Norwegians, and his rolling Bergen
r
’s ripped through the air down by the central station where he was dealing. I let him see my pistol, and that put an abrupt halt to thoserolling
r
’s. They say it’s easier to kill the second time, and I suppose that’s true. I took the guy down to the container port and shot him twice in the head to make it look like the Halden fix. Seeing as the police already had a suspect for the Halden case, they were on the wrong track from day one, and never came close to giving me any grief. And Hoffmann got confirmation of his conviction that I was fixer number one, and gave me another job.
    This one was a young guy who’d called Hoffmann and said he’d rather deal for him than for the Fisherman. He wanted them to meet somewhere discreet so they could discuss the details without the Fisherman finding out. Said he couldn’t stand the stink of the fishmonger’s any more. He should probably have worked a bit harder on his cover story. Hoffmann got hold of me and said he thought the Fisherman had told the guy to fix him.
    The following evening I was waiting for him at the top of the park at Sankt Hanshaugen. There’s a good view from up there. People say it was once used for sacrifices, and that it’s haunted. Mymum told me printers used to boil ink there. All I know is that it’s where the city’s rubbish used to be burned. The forecast said it was going to be minus twelve degrees that evening, so I knew we’d be alone. At nine o’clock a man came walking up the long path to the tower. In spite of the cold his forehead was wet with sweat by the time he reached the top.
    “You’re early,” I said.
    “Who are you?” he asked, mopping his brow with his scarf. “And where’s