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of his system in a way. But he looked at the Rentokil man and told him what he did.
    ‘I’m a lawyer.’
    ‘Blimey.’
    Steinar gave a lop-sided smile. The man held up the little scrap of paper in the air.
    ‘Thanks. I’ll make sure the next technician gets all the information.’
    Technician, thought Steinar. So that’s what they call themselves.

Ambitions
    ‘The post-mortem report isn’t ready yet. What I can give you is a short summary of the report from the first unit on the scene, but you can’t tell anybody where you got it,’ said Arnold Nesje, on the other end of the phone.
    ‘Of course not,’ said Benedikte.
    As a sports journalist, Benedikte had some regular sources. She had a couple of players who could speak well for themselves, and whose clubs used them for everything from advertising jobs to entertainment programmes, as well as requests from journalists. She had a couple of coaches in clubs that were so uninteresting their boards had given them strict instructions not to hold anything back. She had directors of football who almost wept tears of joy when somebody called them, and fellow journalists with chronic verbal diarrhoea. For the Golden case, though, Benedikte needed to think beyond her normal sources, but it was a little harder to call Nesje than most other people, they’d had an on-off relationship for several years. Nesje was in the police, currently with the National Police Immigration Service.
    ‘Golden’s neck was broken,’ he said. ‘It’s presumed that some kind of striking weapon was used, making several perforations in his neck, about a centimetre in depth. The impact killed him instantly. But there are also signs of a struggle before the fatal blow.’
    Benedikte took a note of the information. A broken neck, a weapon, holes in his neck, a struggle. This was something brutal, but was it planned? Was it done in anger? Was hate behind it? Or was it money? Bearing in mind that a football agent was involved, it could be a combination of all these factors.
    She had so many questions, but she knew that Nesje couldn’t answer them yet, nobody could. She looked back down at her notepad.
    ‘I need more help,’ she said.
    ‘What are you up to, anyway?’
    ‘I’m trying to investigate the killing of Arild Golden.’
    ‘I know that, but why?’
    A couple of months previously, Benedikte had presented a story about a 29-year-old Norwegian sprinter who’d had to retire. She couldn’t get the story out of her head. It reminded her of the more senior colleagues she’d seen vanish from the TV screen. Colleagues who hadn’t managed to keep their positions after maternity leave. Colleagues who’d had to watch others being offered the job of presenting the Gullruten TV awards or Idrettsgallaen , the star-studded annual review of Norwegian sport. Her meeting with Steinar Brunsvik made her reflect on this too. He was younger than her when he stopped playing. If there was one thing sports personalities and female faces on commercial TV channels had in common, it was their early sell-by dates.
    The Golden case was her big chance to be something more. Success depends to a large extent on luck, and journalists depend on other people’s achievements or failures. Where would Woodward and Bernstein have been without Nixon? Things like that didn’t happen in football. People in football barely knew who Nixon was, let alone Woodward or Bernstein. The biggest news stories would always deal with somebody getting mixed up with a prostitute, and that somebody would almost without exception be a player in the English Premier League. So for her as a sports journalist, a homicide at the epicentre of Norwegian football could only be described as one thing: a stroke of luck.
    ‘I want to go deeper,’ said Benedikte.
    ‘Give me the names and I’ll check them out.’
    She was still young, but the experience of how easily life could change was burnt into her. How easily a life could be destroyed. It was