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coast.’
    ‘Then the feet that were washed ashore here could therefore have come from completely different parts of the world?’
    The oceanographer shrugged his shoulders. ‘In theory, yes. They could come from a plane crash over the Atlantic Ocean, a shipwreck in the North Sea – or the tsunami in Asia for that matter.’
    Wisting was going to say something aloud about how discouraging this information was for the investigation, but was interrupted when the policeman who was leading the search party approached them.
    ‘A find has been reported,’ he stated, lifting his police radio as though to explain how he had obtained the information. ‘In Skråvika bay.’
    ‘Where’s that?’ asked the oceanographer.
    ‘On the other side of the peninsula,’ Wisting explained, pointing westwards.

CHAPTER 8
    Dark pine trees with crooked, dense branches surrounded the great stretches of flat land above the small, cleft-shaped inlet. Twisted roots crept over the hillside and down towards the edge of the sea. From as far back as the 1950s, the area had been used for open-air concerts and, in a few weeks’ time, stages would be set up once more for a festival which thousands of people would attend and would transform the idyllic place.
    Wisting slammed the car door with a feeling of dejection and impotence. Normally a case like this would fire him up. He would be focused and concentrated. This time he didn’t know how he was going to lead the team through the extensive work that lay ahead, he felt so tired and lacking in motivation. On his way to the station he stopped at a health-food shop to buy dietary supplements.
    The beach had once been popular with bathers because of its fine-grained sand. However, when the sea decided to fill it with large, round boulders, people who liked to swim chose other places. The Red Cross volunteers sat in the shade of the trees. A thin, brown dog lay panting in the heat with its tongue hanging out of its mouth. Wisting ran two fingers around the inside of his collar. His hairline was becoming sweaty.
    He had last been here seven years before. Three men had disappeared out of the inlet in a boat together with the 17 million kroner proceeds of a robbery and an important witness was brutally done away with before he could contact the police. Since that time Wisting had asked himself more and more often what was actually going on in the country. The annual number of crimes had more than tripled since he started in the police force and were frequently characterised by senseless violence.
    On the boulder-strewn beach two uniformed officers stood in discussion with Nils Hammer. Wisting walked over to them with Torunn Borg and the researcher from the Meteorological Institute, noting the odour of salt sea and rotting seaweed. One of the police officers stopped in the middle of a sentence when Wisting caught his eye, taking a few steps to the side to reveal what the sea had washed ashore.
    Wisting stopped. ‘Bloody hell,’ he cursed.
    ‘Yes,’ Hammer said, moving a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. ‘Exactly. Bloody hell.’
    In front of them lay another foot.
    Driftwood, empty plastic bottles and pieces of rope lay along the water’s edge and, tangled in a cluster of bladder wrack, lay a training shoe. Seaweed had covered and almost completely hidden it. At first sight the shoe did not look different from any other flotsam. Wisting sat on his hunkers and swallowed some phlegm. He had seen the same thing before: grey strings and shreds of skin hanging out of the shoe, fibres of flesh and severed tendons, but this was slightly different. It was a different type of shoe. This one was white, with the three black Adidas stripes along the side. At the same time, it seemed smaller than the two others.
    Wisting cocked his head, studying it from slightly different angles to be sure. This, too, was a left shoe. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said once more and moved away. A nerve at his temple