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he seemed to be searching for something to focus on as he slid down the fence like sleet on a car windscreen, until he lay lifeless on the ground.
    ‘What do we do now?’ Beate breathed.
    Harry felt his teeth crunching and spat into his hand. From the light of the torch he saw red grit.
    ‘You ring for an ambulance while I get the wirecutters from the car,’ he said.
    ‘Then he was given sedatives, was he?’ Anna asked.
    Harry nodded and sipped his Coke.
    The young West End clientele perched on bar stools around them drinking wine, shiny drinks and Diet Coke. M was like most cafés in Oslo – urban in a provincial and naive but, as far as it went, pleasant way, which made Harry think about Kebab, the bright, well-behaved boy in his class at school who, they discovered, kept a book of all the slang expressions the ‘in’ kids used.
    ‘They took the poor guy to hospital. Then we chatted to the neighbour again and she told us he had been out there hitting tennis balls every evening since his wife had been killed.’
    ‘Goodness. Why?’
    Harry hunched his shoulders. ‘It’s not so unusual for people to become psychotic when they lose someone in those circumstances. Some repress it and act as if the deceased were still alive. The neighbour said Stine and Trond Grette were a fantastic mixed-doubles pair, that they practised on the court almost every afternoon in the summer.’
    ‘So he was kind of expecting his wife to return the serve?’
    ‘Maybe.’
    ‘Jeesus! Will you get me a beer while I go to the loo?’
    Anna swung her legs off the stool and wiggled her way across the room. Harry tried not to follow her movements. He didn’t need to, he had seen as much as he wanted. She had a few wrinkles around the eyes, a couple of grey strands in her raven-black hair; otherwise she was exactly the same. The same black eyes with the slightly hunted expression under the fused eyebrows, the same high, narrow nose above the indecently full lips and the hollow cheeks which tended togive her a hungry look. She might not have qualified for the epithet ‘beautiful’ – for that her features were too hard and stark – but her slim body was curvaceous enough for Harry to spot at least two men at tables in the dining area lose their thread as she passed.
    Harry lit another cigarette. After Grette, they had paid a visit to Helge Klementsen, the branch manager, but that hadn’t given them much to work on, either. He was still in a state of shock, sitting in a chair in his duplex in Kjelsåsveien and staring alternately at the poodle scurrying between his legs and his wife scurrying between kitchen and sitting room with coffee and the driest cream horn Harry had ever tasted. Beate’s choice of clothes had suited the Klementsen family’s bourgeois home better than Harry’s faded Levi’s and Doc Martens. Nevertheless, it was mostly Harry who maintained conversation with the nervously tripping fru Klementsen about the unusually high precipitation this autumn and the art of making cream horns, to the interruptions above of stamping feet and loud sobbing. Fru Klementsen explained that her daughter Ina, the poor thing, was seven months pregnant to a man who had just given her the heave-ho. Well, in fact, he was a sailor and had set sail for the Mediterranean. Harry had almost spattered the cream horn across the table. It was then that Beate took charge and asked Helge, who had given up pursuing the dog with his eyes as it had padded out through the living-room door, ‘How tall would you say the robber was?’
    Helge had observed her, then picked up the coffee cup and lifted it to his mouth where, of necessity, it had to wait because he couldn’t drink and talk at the same time: ‘Tall? Two metres perhaps. She was always so accurate, Stine was.’
    ‘He wasn’t that tall, herr Klementsen.’
    ‘Alright, one ninety. And always so well turned out.’
    ‘What was he wearing?’
    ‘Something black, like rubber. This summer she