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Harry looked at the clientele and at the city outside. At the new Oslo. Not the rich Oslo, but the filthy rich Oslo. Only the suit and shoes he was wearing belonged here. Or maybe not. A couple of years ago he had come by to check out this place, and before backing out the door, he had seen the lead singer from Turbonegro sitting at a table. He had looked as lonely as Harry was feeling now. He took out his phone. She was listed as A. He tapped in a message.

I’m in town. Can we meet?

Then he put the phone down on the bar, noticed a figure slipping in beside him and heard a soft American voice order ginger beer in an accent he couldn’t quite place. He glanced at the mirror behind the bar. The bottles on the shelf hid the man’s face, but Harry managed to see something bright white around his neck. A clerical collar of the sort visible all the way around, and which they called a dog collar in the USA. The priest was served his beer and disappeared.

Harry was halfway through his drink when the reply from Alexandra Sturdza came.

Yeah, I saw in the paper that you were back. Depends what you mean by meet.

A coffee at the Forensic Med, he typed. After 12 tomorrow for instance.

He had to wait a long time. She probably understood this wasn’t an attempt to get back into the warmth of her bed again, which she had so generously offered after Rakel had kicked him out. Generosity he had been unable to reciprocate in the end, despite how uncomplicated things had been between them. It had been all the rest, everything outside of Alexandra’s bed, he hadn’t been able to handle. Depends what you mean by meet. The worst part was that he wasn’t entirely sure if the answer was that it was solely about the job in hand. Because he was lonely. He knew of no one who needed to be alone as much as he did; Rakel had called it ‘limited social capacity’ and she had also been the only person he could — and wanted to — spend time with without picturing a finishing tape up ahead, knowing that he would be set free at some point. You could of course be alone without being lonely, and lonely without being alone, but now he was lonely. And alone.

Maybe that was why he had been hoping for an unequivocal yes instead of this depends. Had she got a boyfriend? Why not? Would make sense, really. Although the guy would be in for a wild ride.

Only when he had paid for the drink and was on the way down to his room did the phone vibrate again.

1 p.m.

Prim opened the freezer.

Next to a large freezer bag there lay several small ziplock bags, of the type drug dealers used. Two of them contained strands of hair, one some bloody skin fragments, and another pieces of a cloth he had cut up. Items he might one day have use for. He took out a ziplock bag containing moss and made his way past the dining table and the aquarium. Stooped down in front of the glass box on top of the desk. Checked the humidity sensor, removed the lid, opened the ziplock bag and sprinkled moss down onto the black soil. Studied the animal inside, a bright pink slug, almost twenty centimetres in length. Prim never tired of watching it. Not that it was like an action film exactly; if the slug moved at all, it was only a matter of a few centimetres an hour. And neither was there much visible emotional drama or theatrics. The slug’s only way of expressing itself — or of obtaining impressions — was its antennae, which you usually had to observe for a while to register movement. And it was that aspect of the slug that was comparable to looking at Her; even the slightest movement or gesture was a reward. Only by patience could he win Her favour, make Her understand.

It was a Mount Kaputar slug. He had brought two of them all the way home from the mountain in New South Wales in Australia. The pink slug was found only there, in a forested area of ten square kilometres at the foot of Mount Kaputar. As the seller had told him: one single bushfire could at any time wipe out the entire species. Therefore, Prim had no pangs of conscience at sidestepping all export and import bans. Slugs were generally host to so many unpleasant parasite microbes that smuggling them over borders was as legal as smuggling radioactive material. So Prim was fairly certain that these were the only two specimens of the pink slug in all of Norway. And should Australia and the rest of the world burn, that might prove to be the salvation of the species. Yes, for life on the whole that day mankind no longer existed. It was simply a question of time. Because nature only retains that which serves nature. Bowie was right when he sang that Homo sapiens had outgrown their use.