Page 110 of The Living and the Dead

“Sometimes. Not often, I guess, but sure.”

“Did Alice know you didn’t have it with you?”

Jakob didn’t say anything. He shook his head. “I left it in the garage.”

“So if she asked, when you got home,” Vidar said, “say, if she’d called you and you didn’t pick up, you could tell her you’d forgotten it.”

“Yes,” he admitted, perhaps relieved that Vidar had said it for him. “That’s about it.”

Vidar waited, looking almost bored, like he wanted to get this over with so he could go home. He studied Jakob’s hands. Hands almost always revealed more than a face. Did Jakob have it in him?

Yes, he probably did. But why?

“I’d like to ask you about that evening too. After Filip was found and you spoke to us. What did you do after that?”

Don’t say it,Vidar thought.Lie tome.

Lie to me, and I’ve got you.

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“Nothing,” Jakob said. “We were just at home. Trying to make sense of what had happened. The kids wondered, too, they knew something was up.”

“Did you talk about it?”

“Not in detail. The fourteen-year-old got it all anyway, of course, just like us when we were that age.”

“So you didn’t make any calls or anything?”

“We talked to Alice’s parents. Or, you know, Alice did.”

“And you stayed in Skavböke all that evening and night?”

“Yes.”

Vidar clicked his pen and jotted something down before placing it aside again.

“Thank you, Jakob. That’s good.”

Jakob exhaled and leaned back. Vidar had placed a binder on the floor earlier. Now he put it on the table and paged through to the right sheet protector, turned it around to face Jakob.

“You recognize this,” Vidar said, “don’t you?”

It was the scrap of fabric, dark green with lighter stripes, the one Siri and Gerd had once extracted from the jaws of a dead dog.

“I’ve been given to understand,” Vidar continued, when Jakob didn’t answer, “that you know where the rest of this is. Is that true?”

Jakob stared at Vidar. He opened his mouth, but nothing came out.

Instead, Vidar spoke: “How come you didn’t tell the truth from the start?”

“I…just didn’t know.”

“But you talked to someone about the shirt.”

Jakob nodded again, but this time he looked grim, as if Vidar’s question confirmed that a betrayal had taken place.

“Who?”