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lab half an hour ago, but if I know Kittelsen, you won’t get anything out of him until he’s had his coffee break. Which is at noon,” said the crime tech.
    Everyone chuckled. They were all familiar with Kittelsen and his moods.
    “From what I saw,” Grongstad went on, “it wouldn’t surprise me if he says that she was severely beaten before she was killed. Her body was covered in bruises. But as I mentioned to Singsaker earlier, it’s unlikely that it happened where she was found.”
    “So you think she was moved there after she was dead?”
    “It’s too early to say for sure. Although I do think that her throat was cut in the woods. So the question is, What killed her? The beating, which came first, or the knife, which came later?”
    “We need to get Kittelsen to move quickly on this,” Brattberg said without much hope. “In the meantime, the rest of us have to get to work and start collecting information. It’s going to be a busy day.”
    The meeting was over. Gro Brattberg handled things clearly and in a straightforward way. And that boosted everyone’s confidence. Singsaker felt a mild headache fade almost before he noticed it. None of them wanted another chaotic investigation like the one they’d been through while investigating the grisly murders the previous fall.
    *   *   *
    Singsaker happened to know quite a bit about Ringve Manor. As he drove out to Lade, he refreshed his memory, in case it would prove to be useful to the case.
    The manor had been separated from the Lade estate in the seventeenth century. It had had numerous different owners and had undergone several phases of construction. Like most people who lived in Trondheim, Singsaker associated the estate most closely with Victoria Bachke and the museum.
    In 1919, the young Victoria, then twenty-one years old, visited Ringve for the first time. Several months later she married the owner of the estate, Christian Ancker Bachke. She and her husband then made plans for the founding of Ringve Museum, although their vision was not realized until after Christian’s death. A museum honoring the naval hero Peter Wessel Tordenskiold was first established in 1950. Two years later the present-day museum opened, devoted to musical instruments, based on the extensive and diverse collection owned by the Bachkes. Ringve is today Norway’s National Museum for Musical Instruments, and the collection includes approximately two thousand audio exhibits. It was also the country’s only professional workshop for conserving instruments.
    Singsaker trudged across the cobblestone courtyard between the nicely restored mansions. Ringve did seem like the right place to start. The woman without a throat, he thought. Maybe that was significant; maybe it wasn’t. The killer had removed the human body’s own musical instrument and replaced it with a mechanical one: the music box. It was possible that everything he knew about Ringve was just filler in his brain. He often wondered why his memory loss from the brain tumor operation a year ago hadn’t erased any of the the haphazard knowledge he had. An absurd and yet frightening thought occurred to him. What if those random thoughts were the ones that fed the tumors?
    Then he went inside and asked to see Jonas Røed.
    *   *   *
    “Well, this is certainly interesting. A music box made with remarkable skill. We rarely ever see one of such good quality. Especially not with such an exquisite ballerina on the lid.”
    Jonas Røed’s voice was slightly shrill and intense. It sounded like an untuned instrument that Singsaker had never heard before, but one that could undoubtedly be found in the museum. Røed gestured vigorously with one hand as he talked, emphasizing his words. His hair was equally energetic and oddly enough matched his last name, Norwegian for “red.” His hair was cut short in back, and in front his bangs partially obscuring his eyes. Singsaker wasn’t quite sure what to make of this man.