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whispered into her hair. I inhaled her. It was like smoking opium—I felt myself going numb at the same time as all my senses quivered. “Daniel knows you had a lover. Benjamin. He’s dead now.”
    “Is…is Benjamin dead?”
    “Yes. And if you’re here when Daniel gets home, he’ll kill you too. You have to come with me, Corina.”
    She blinked at me in confusion. “Where to?”
    It was a surprising question. I’d been expecting “Why?”, “Who are you?” or “You’re lying!”But maybe she instinctively realised that I was telling the truth, that it was urgent, maybe that was why she got straight to the point. Unless she was just so confused and resigned that she blurted out the first thing that came into her head.
    “To the room beyond the room,” I said.

CHAPTER 7
    S he was sitting curled up in the only armchair in my flat, staring at me.
    She was even more beautiful like that: frightened, alone, vulnerable. Dependent.
    I had—somewhat unnecessarily—explained that my flat wasn’t much to boast about, basically just a simple bachelor pad with a living room and an alcove for the bed. Clean and tidy, but no place for a woman like her. But it had one big advantage: no one knew where it was. To be more precise: no one—and by that I do literally mean
no one
—knew where I lived.
    “Why not?” she asked, clasping the cup of coffee I’d given her.
    She’d asked for tea, but I’d told her she’d have to wait till morning, and that I’d get some as soon as the shops opened. That I knew she liked tea in the morning. That I’d watched her drinking tea every morning for the past five days.
    “It’s best if no one knows your address when you’re in my line of work,” I replied.
    “But now I know.”
    “Yes.”
    We drank our coffee in silence.
    “Does that mean you don’t have any friends or relations?” she asked.
    “I have a mother.”
    “Who doesn’t know…?”
    “No.”
    “And obviously she doesn’t know about your job either.”
    “No.”
    “What have you told her you do?”
    “Fixer.”
    “Odd jobs?”
    I stared at Corina Hoffmann. Was she really interested, or just talking for the sake of it?
    “Yes.”
    “Right.” A shiver ran through her and she folded her arms over her chest. I’d turned the oven on full, but with the single-glazed windows and temperatures down at minus twenty for over a week, the cold had got the upper hand. I fiddled with my cup.
    “What do you want to do, Olav?”
    I got up from the kitchen chair. “See if I can find you a blanket.”
    “I mean, what are
we
going to do?”
    She was okay. You know someone’s okay if they can ignore things they can’t do anything about and move on. Wish I was like that.
    “He’s going to come after me, Olav. After us. We can’t hide here for ever. And that’s how long he’ll go on looking. Believe me, I know him. He’d rather die than live with this shame.”
    I didn’t ask the obvious question: So why did you take his son as your lover?
    Instead I asked a less obvious one.
    “Because of the shame? Not because he loves you?”
    She shook her head. “It’s complicated.”
    “We’ve got plenty of time,” I said. “And as you can see, I haven’t got a television.”
    She laughed. I still hadn’t fetched that blanket. Or asked the question that for some reason I was desperate to ask: Did you love him? The son?
    “Olav?”
    “Yes?”
    She lowered her voice. “Why are you doing this?”
    I took a deep breath. I had prepared an answer to this question. Several answers, actually, in case I felt that the first one didn’t work. At least, I thought I had prepared some answers. But at that moment they all vanished.
    “It’s wrong,” I said.
    “What’s wrong?”
    “What he’s doing. Trying to have his own wife killed.”
    “And what would you have done if your wife was seeing another man in your own home?”
    She had me there.
    “I think you’ve got a good heart, Olav.”
    “Good hearts come cheap