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Very good. Finally someone’s going to look at it. You see . . . I’ve prayed for the longest time for the Janne Eide case to be reopened. I’d almost given up hope.”
     
    “You remember it well?”
     
    “Of course. I’m not a stupid secretary or a senile old woman. It’s not every day that lead detective Bjørn Nygård . . . a great detective . . . a sober and intelligent man of integrity . . . gets thrown off a case . . . and then he gets shoved off the Zoo with a miserly early retirement package that he was forced into accepting.”
     
    “Did he have a choice to stay?”
     
    “No . . . not unless he wanted to get demoted on some made-up excuse and then assigned to be a lowly cop in some God-forsaken Arctic island town near the North Pole.”
     
    “Why did all that happen?”
     
    “They say it was because your friend Ivar Thorsen wanted to get promoted and take Nygård’s job.”
     
    “ They say ? . . . Was it true?”
     
    “Yes and no.”
     
    “By the way Fru Sivertsen . . . Ivar Thorsen and I used to be childhood friends. We were best friends from elementary school to high school . . . but at the start of our senior year in high school I noticed that he would say nasty things about me to make himself popular . . . I used to be quite a fat kid back then.”
     
    “Surely not. You’re skeletal now.”
     
    “I’m on the skinny side nowadays . . . but I’ve gained weight recently since I don’t have the time to run as much as I used to. . . . But back in high school Thorsen would make nasty comments or jokes about me being fat . . . I let the insults slide by since he was desperately trying to get accepted . . . but he crossed the line when he went out of his way to betray me at a debate tournament. You see . . . Thorsen and his debate partner had lost to my team because I had come up with a clever and brand new argument that no one ever expected.”
     
    “What did the little jerk do?”
     
    “Went and told all the other teams of all the other schools what my partner and I were doing. That took away our element of surprise . . . it gave the other teams enough time to prepare. We lost on the fourth round. He later denied betraying me.”
     
    “Everything sounds like something he’d do.”
     
    “I pretty much cut him off after that . . . my mother begged me to take him back as a friend . . . but I refused to since he wouldn’t apologize.”
     
    “Well of course. You can’t take someone back into your life if they don’t apologize . . . especially when they’ve betrayed you in big or small ways.”
     
    “That’s my philosophy,” said Sohlberg. He wanted to add that it was too bad that his own wife’s family—especially his wife’s mother—didn’t see it that way. Sohlberg detested his mother-in-law for coercing her entire family into repeatedly bringing back into the family a toxic and dysfunctional loser of a son-in-law. The jerk always wreaked havoc and triggered awful fights whenever he was allowed back into the family.
     
    “Good for you Solly. I always knew that you and I think alike.”
     
    “We do. Anyway . . . I was glad to get rid of Thorsen since we were about to graduate from high school. I thought I’d never see him again. We definitely went our own separate ways when I went into law . . . except for when I gave him a reference to get into the Zoo.”
     
    “My boy Solly . . . that was my next question. I saw your letter in his file when Thorsen applied. You were with a law firm back then . . . quite a successful up-and-coming young lawyer. Why help him?”
     
    “Thorsen begged me. In writing. By phone. And in person. Over and over. Told me how hard life was delivering newspapers in the suburbs for a living . . . told me he hated having to sometimes make ends meet by doing janitor work and odd jobs for a pittance. I felt sorry for him. He had no real job or career at the time.”
     
    “Or education my boy. . . .”
     
    “Yes. He later told me that he