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messages. It doesn’t even have time to beep before he shakes his head in despair.

Chapter 6
    In the old days Henning used to go running along the River Aker late at night, though he would sometimes come across people he would rather not meet after the hours of darkness. He would always jog straight past them and ignore their offers of all sorts of dubious merchandise. Even so, it was never a very pleasant experience.
    A similar unease comes over him as he walks past Riverside, the café at the bottom of Markveien, to get round to the back of Grünerhjemmet. But there are no unsavoury characters around tonight, only the river, which winds its way down to Oslo Fjord under a bridge.
    It could have been a picture postcard of the city. There are old ruins and tall trees on the far side of the river. On warm summer days people sit in Riverside or on the grassy bank leading down to the water and let life and the river flow past. But the area around the mouth of the Aker has become a haven for drug dealers and their customers. Once upon a time such people would have hidden in the shadows because it was shameful both to sell and to buy drugs, but now everything is out in the open and no one seems to care. The police know what goes on, but don’t have the resources to do anything about it. And if one dealer is arrested, another will take his place the next day.
    Henning follows the road around the care home where bushes as lifeless as the residents inside have been planted along the walls. He knows how hard it is to get a place in a care home these days. You practically have to have one foot in the grave already. It means that many vulnerable people in Oslo and in the rest of Norway have to rely on self-sacrificing relatives or visits from care workers in their own homes.
    Henning wanders around the car park while he waits for someone to emerge from the back entrance. For the first fifteen minutes nothing happens. He looks at his watch. Slowly 9 p.m. turns into 9.30. In his former life he might have lit a cigarette – or fourteen – while he waited, but he stopped smoking completely after the fire. There’s something about flames and embers. He can’t look at them without seeing his son’s eyes in all the red and orange.
    The door opens and a woman comes out. She has brown hair and is wearing a beige coat.
    ‘Excuse me,’ Henning says, rushing towards her. She instinctively slows down.
    ‘Do you work here?’ he asks.
    The woman’s expression immediately becomes guarded as she reluctantly replies ‘yes’. Henning knows that the burn scars on his face can make him look scary, especially in the dark, so he follows up his assertive opening with a smile that’s intended to be disarming. The woman walks off.
    ‘Sorry, but you’ll have to talk to someone else,’ she calls out.
    ‘I—’
    ‘I don’t talk to people like you.’
    Henning is left standing with a reply that withers on the tip of his tongue.
    Ten minutes later a man appears. He is happy to stop, but neither speaks nor understands Norwegian terribly well. It doesn’t, however, prevent him from chatting and smiling. Henning eventually works out that the man has washed the floors on the ground and first floors tonight, but he doesn’t know anything about what happened on the floors higher up.
    ‘Who lives on the third floor?’ Henning asks him.
    ‘All the mad people,’ the man says.
    Henning frowns.
    ‘The mad people?’
    ‘Yes, the ones who’ve gone gaga.’
    The man smiles and reveals a row of bright white teeth.
    ‘Right,’ Henning says.
    The man gives him a thumbs-up before he gets on his bicycle and rides off.
    So the victim suffered from dementia, Henning concludes. It’s not a story in itself, but it’s a useful detail to include. He needs more.
    Henning knows that care staff have a duty of confidentiality, but it’s not a rule that has bothered him before. In his experience some people simply enjoy chatting. It’s just a question of