perch.
"Where?!" he said at once.
Sejer sat down. "At Annie's house. Sølvi has inherited her sister's things, and this was among them, wrapped in newspaper. I went out to the cemetery. It fits like a glove." He looked at Skarre. "Someone could have given it to her."
"Who?"
"I don't know. But if she went there and took it herself, really went there, under cover of darkness, and used some kind of tool to break it off the headstone, then that's quite an unscrupulous thing to do."
"But Annie wasn't unscrupulous, was she?"
"I'm not entirely sure. I'm not sure about anything any more."
Skarre turned the lamp away from the desk so that it made a perfect half-moon on the wall. They sat and stared at it. On impulse, Skarre picked up the bird, gripping it by its perch, and held it up to the lamp with a swaying motion. The shadow it made in the white moon was like a giant drunken duck on its way home from a party.
"Jensvoll has resigned from his job as coach of the girls' team," Skarre said.
"What did you say?"
"The rumours are starting to circulate. The rape conviction has come out, and it's hovering over the waters. The girls stopped showing up."
"I thought that would happen. One thing leads to another."
"And Fritzner was right. Things are going to be tough for a lot of people now, until the murderer is caught. But that will happen soon, because by now you've worked it all out, haven't you?"
Sejer shook his head. "It has something to do with Annie and Johnas. Something happened between the two of them."
"Maybe she just wanted a keepsake to remind her of Eskil."
"If that was it, she could have knocked on the door and asked for a teddy-bear or something."
"Do you think he did something to her?"
"Either to her or maybe to someone else she had a relationship with. Someone she loved."
"Now I don't follow you – do you mean Halvor?"
"I mean his son, Eskil. He died because Johnas was in the bathroom shaving."
"But she couldn't very well blame him because of that."
"Not unless there's something unresolved about the way Eskil died."
Skarre whistled. "No one else was there to see what happened. All we have to go on is what Johnas said."
Sejer picked up the bird again and gently poked at its sharp beak. "So what do you think, Jacob? What really happened on that November morning."
Memories flooded over him as he opened the double glass doors and took a few steps inside. The hospital smell, a mixture of antiseptic and soap, combined with the sweet scent of chocolate from the gift shop and the spicy fragrance of carnations from the flower stand.
Instead of thinking about his wife's death, Sejer tried to think about his daughter Ingrid on the day she was born. This enormous building held memories of both the greatest sorrow and the greatest joy of his life. Back then he had stepped through these same doors and noticed the same smells. Involuntarily he had compared his own new-born daughter to the other infants. He thought they were redder and fatter and had more wrinkles, and that their hair was more rumpled. Or they were born prematurely and looked like undernourished miniature old men. Only Ingrid was utterly perfect. The recollection helped him to relax at last.
He was not arriving unannounced. It had taken him exactly eight minutes on the phone to locate the pathologist who had overseen the autopsy of Eskil Johnas. He made it clear in advance what he was interested in, so they could find the files and reports and get them out for him. One of the things he liked about the bureaucracy, that unwieldy, cumbersome, difficult system that governed all departments, was the principle that everything had to be recorded and archived. Dates, times, names, diagnoses, routines, irregularities, everything had to be on the file. Every facet of a case could be taken out and re-examined, by other people with different motives, with fresh eyes.
That's what he was thinking as he got out of the lift. He noticed the hospital smell grow stronger as he walked along the corridor of the eighth floor. The pathologist, who had sounded staid and middle-aged on the phone, turned out to be a young man. A stout fellow with thick glasses and soft, plump hands. On his desk stood a card file, a phone, a stack of papers, and a big red book with Chinese characters on it.
"I have to confess that I