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be?’
    I threw up my hands. ‘Genes. Environment, and here I’m not necessarily thinking of the home environment. People who became her friends. The teachers. There’s an incredible number of possible influences. So the guilt can very seldom be laid at any one door. There are always several different factors at work.’
    She nodded. ‘Yes, I suppose there are.’
    ‘And what about your husband, have you spoken to him today?’
    ‘Yes, I speak to him every day now about all this.’
    ‘Have you told him about me?’
    ‘No, yes … He’s started to say that we … That the police should be involved.’
    ‘I can quite understand that.’
    ‘But you said yourself –’
    ‘Let me put it like this. The police have something I don’t have – a whole apparatus. In other words, they can put out a general call over their entire network, to the other Scandinavian countries as well, with a cover I could never even begin to approach. On the other hand … Before it’s been established that something serious has happened, the police will seldom have time to conduct the sort of detailed investigation I’m engaged in now.’
    ‘So …’
    ‘I would absolutely advise you to get the police to investigate her disappearance but let me carry on with what I’m already doing. That is, unless you two want to save yourselves the expense.’
    ‘The money’s no problem,’ she said quickly. ‘What’s important is to find her and that … she’s all right.’
    ‘I ought to speak to your husband himself at some point.’
    ‘If he has time,’ she said somewhat tartly. ‘Anyway, I think I can almost guarantee you’re wasting your time. There’s nothing he can tell you about Torild that I can’t tell you.’
    ‘Isn’t there? But there could be something you’ve – overlooked – that he might think of …’
    ‘Hm,’ she said in a tone that indicated she didn’t have much faith in that.
    I stood up with a final look at The Three Stages of Torild still on the table in front of us. ‘Well … in that case, I’d better …’
    How mysterious people were. Could we ever get to know another person – properly? Or would they always keep something or other hidden from us, something we ourselves had perhaps known once but had gradually forgotten over the years?
    She came with me to the door. ‘You’ll ring as soon as you – have any news, won’t you?’
    ‘Of course.’
    Down at the lights that control the traffic in the narrowest part of Sædalsveien, I waited at red. It struck me that certain situations in life are just like this too. You sit waiting at red, and when the light eventually changes to green, an articulated truck squeezing through on amber slams straight into you without giving you the faintest chance of avoiding it.
    When the light changed to green it was with the greatest caution that I drove around the first blind bend.

Six
     
     
    THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE in Mannsverk have never liked hearing the district called by its original name of Toadsmarsh. But at the end of the fifties, when we were in competition with some boys from that district over a couple of girls from Fridalen, we never called them anything but toads, which unleashed such a backlash that we very soon had to leave the Fridalen girls to their own devices and turn back to the more central parts of town, where it was us who were cocks of the walk.
    Astrid Nikolaisen lived in the thirteen-storey block of flats that serves as the landmark for the whole district. The thoroughfare running beneath it became a veritable wind tunnel when the wind blew from that direction.
    I found her surname on one of the letter boxes beside the entrance to the lifts but had to search floor by floor along the external walkway to find the right apartment. In addition to the two lifts, there was a staircase at every corner of the building, and I zigzagged my way up to the sixth floor, where I found the same name on a door and rang the bell.
    The woman who opened the