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could well turn on an unknown someone coming forward.

CHAPTER 9
    Line parked on the stone-covered courtyard in front of the house in Herman Wildenveysgate.
    She still thought of it as coming home, even though she had not lived here for almost six years. Moving to Oslo when she was twenty, she had begun studying media and communications but, after a year, had become fed up with schoolbooks and the curriculum. She wanted to gain practical experience and took a temporary job on her local newspaper back home. Finding a bed-sit in the town, she quickly realised that writing was what she really wanted to do.
    The temporary post at Østlandsposten was like a door opening, just a crack, and she did not take long to step through. The profession of journalism suited her inquisitiveness and critical faculties. She got good responses to her work, her headlines increased in number and size, and quite soon she moved to another temporary post at Verdens Gang newspaper in Oslo. Her contract had been extended three times and, although newspapers throughout the country were cutting back, she hoped in time to win a permanent appointment. Someone, after all, would have to replace the sly old foxes when they eventually retired. She had already achieved one of VG ’s ‘golden pen’ awards and, the year previously, she had been awarded the national SKUP prize for investigative journalism for her exposure of an international drugs network that used under-age asylum seekers for smuggling throughout Europe.
    By taking a one-year course of study on the internet, she had acquired a formal qualification, and after Easter had added to the sixty study points with a further course in features journalism. This aspect of the profession attracted her increasingly, not just the reporting of news but the telling of a story. Her talent for giving the material a personal voice had taken her into the features department.
    She got out of the car and took out a bunch of keys on which she still had her old key. It always gave her a pang of homesickness to look at the brown-stained house with white window-frames. The garden had not been well looked after since her mother’s death, but it was still growing, ivy still climbed the walls around the entrance, framing the front door.
    When she was in her hometown she usually stayed at Tommy Kvanter’s flat in the centre. They had been in the same class at times during primary and junior high school, but had not seen each other for ten years until they met again the previous autumn while Line was covering a murder case. Since then they had spent a lot of time together, but the relationship had not blossomed sufficiently to feel they were a couple. Work and studies meant she had to push such thoughts aside. Perhaps she also had to admit that they did not really suit each other so well. Tommy was impulsive and went his own way. He lived without worries and sometimes showed an unpredictable spontaneity, with a lifestyle that brought him into social circles that scared her. He had two prison sentences behind him, the longer of which was a year and a half for importing five kilos of hashish. In all likelihood, this was the real reason that she did not see a long future together.
    His spontaneity was attractive and frightening at the same time. She envied his ability to live in the moment, and when they were together, many of her worries about the future disappeared.
    Tommy worked as a chef on a Danish factory trawler that fished for prawns around Greenland. He was out for two weeks at a time. She had her own key to his flat, but she didn’t like to stay when he was not at home. Neither of them was particularly happy about the commuting job that meant long spells apart. More often these days, Tommy talked about coming ashore and moving in with her in Oslo, where he could get a job in a restaurant. She didn’t know if she really liked the suggestion.
    Unlocking the door of the house she continued to think of as home she