The Catalyst Killing (K2 and Patricia series Book 3) (2 page)

It sounded more like an order than a question. I replied immediately that it would.

‘Did Marie Morgenstierne throw herself on the tracks, did she fall, or was she pushed?’ I asked.

I should not have done that. Patricia let out a deep sigh, and answered rather pointedly: ‘No. She was shot.’

Thus I could confirm with alarmed relief that Patricia was clearly as on the ball as she had been the year before. She waited until I asked for more details, and then replied without hesitation, ‘I would be very surprised if Marie Morgenstierne was not shot only seconds after the train you were on pulled away from the station. And I think it is highly unlikely that she was shot with a hunting rifle of this year’s model. But hopefully you will know more about that when we meet this evening.’

I replied that I had every hope that I would. Then I put the phone down and left the flat straight away. My mind was already slightly scrambled, but I did have the clarity to realize that I would not be spending much time at home over the next few days.

II

At the office I was informed that a routine examination of the scene of the crime and door-to-door enquiries around Smestad had come up with nothing. So I called the national radio station and asked them to make an announcement calling for possible witnesses in Smestad area the evening before. I quickly established that the newspapers had not yet picked up on the death. The headlines were dominated by the new mid-distance running star Arne Kvalheim’s victory in a race at the Bislett Games, and the one hundred or so demonstrators who had set up camp in order to prevent the planned development of a power plant in Mardøla in Møre and Romsdal municipality.

Having looked through the papers, I sat for a while deep in thought. There were no files of any sort on Marie Morgenstierne in the police records and the census records only contained a single sheet of paper that was of little help. She was simply recorded as living at an address in Frogner, the most desirable part of Oslo.

It occurred to me that it was rather odd that we had heard nothing from her parents or other relatives. When I looked in the telephone directory, I discovered that a Martin Morgenstierne lived at the same address, and he was listed as bank manager. I dialled the number several times and let it ring for a long time, without getting an answer.

In anticipation of the family getting in touch or of finding any information about Marie Morgenstierne, I threw myself into the rather thick file regarding her fiancé’s disappearance in August 1968. It was exciting stuff and, like Patricia, I found it hard to believe there was no connection between Falko Reinhardt’s disappearance and Marie’s death.

Falko Reinhardt, Marie Morgenstierne and four other young people from radical student circles at the University of Oslo had travelled together to a cabin in Vestre Slidre in Valdres on Saturday, 3 August 1968. The statements were unanimous in that Falko had been the one who initiated the trip, the purpose of which was to have four uninterrupted days to plan the autumn’s anti-Vietnam demonstrations and other activities, as well as spend time together. The first two days of the trip had passed without incident.

On Monday, 5 August Falko had left the cabin for a few hours, without saying before or afterwards where he had gone. In the evening a storm had blown up, with driving rain and wind, and the six students had stayed indoors. Some alcohol had been consumed, but as they later remembered it, it was not a lot. The storm had instilled a growing feeling of unease. This had been triggered by an episode earlier in the evening when one of the young women claimed to have seen a face wearing a black eye mask look in at the window. The students had gone out into the storm together, but found no trace of anyone. ‘Incident very odd indeed, but statements credible nonetheless’ was written across the report from the hearings. I noted this down and continued to read with keen interest.

The real drama in Valdres did not start until two in the morning, when Marie Morgenstierne screamed so loudly that two of the students sleeping in another room woke up.

They came rushing in to find her alone in the bedroom. Falko Reinhardt’s side of the bed was empty. His jacket was still hanging in the wardrobe, but the rest of his clothes and shoes were gone. The window was closed, because of the rain outside.

At this point, my reading was interrupted by an irritating, impatient knocking on my office door. It was five past eleven.

III

I sighed, put down the papers with considerable reluctance and opened the door. The person responsible for this interruption proved to be a very flustered pathologist.

‘The woman from the tracks was not only dead before the train hit her, but even before she fell on the rails . . .’ he stammered.

With an impatient wave, I indicated that he should continue. ‘She was shot. I have already established that!’

The pathologist nodded eagerly and bowed, obviously impressed with the pace of my investigation.

‘This is slightly less certain, but I also have reason to believe that she was not shot with an ordinary hunting rifle.’

He nodded even more frantically and bowed even more deeply. ‘It is truly incredible what you have been able to work out by yourself without technical assistance. The bullet appears to come from an older, less common 22-calibre gun, possibly a small-bore rifle or some other relatively light weapon, but could also have been a pistol of some sort.’

I asked the pathologist if he had anything else of importance to tell, then sent him out of the office when the answer was no. My thoughts were still in Valdres in the summer of ’68, on the stormy night when Falko Reinhardt vanished from a bedroom where the window was closed from the inside.

IV

How Falko Reinhardt had disappeared from the cabin was a mystery in itself. According to the police statements, one of the female students in the next room had been awake all night with a headache and the door was ajar. She was able to give an accurate account of who had passed the door after midnight. Marie Morgenstierne had gone out to the kitchen for a glass of water, and one of the male students had gone out onto the step for some fresh air. And the other young man had gone to the toilet. But none of them had seen or heard anything of Falko Reinhardt – and yet he was gone.

According to the statements from Marie Morgenstierne and the others, she was beside herself and convinced that her fiancé had been abducted or murdered. They had discussed the situation for an hour in the hope that he would show up again, but the group grew increasingly uneasy when he failed to appear. It was Marie Morgenstierne who had pushed for them to go out into the storm together at around three in the morning. But there was no sign of Falko or anyone else near the cabin. One of the students said that she saw a person in the distance through the storm, but it was too far away and visibility was too poor for any of the others to verify this.

The five students had then retreated back into the cabin. They had stayed awake for the rest of the night, huddled together in the living room, anxious and upset, without any means of contacting the outside world or doing anything at all.

When the storm subsided the following morning, the students went out together again. There were still no footprints to be found. But they did make a very worrying discovery not far from the cabin.

They found Falko Reinhardt’s left shoe behind a large stone not far from a sheer drop of around three hundred feet.

This obviously made them fear that he might have fallen, been pushed or jumped off the cliff in the dark, though the latter idea made the students indignant and they dismissed it. The theory that Falko Reinhardt’s life had in some way ended on the stones at the base of the cliff was reinforced when his right shoe was found in the scree later in the day.

The only problem was that no one could find Falko Reinhardt, or any trace of him, even when the area was searched twice by a large contingent from the Home Guard. Dead or alive, the missing man had simply vanished, first from the cabin, and then into thin air.

Falko Reinhardt had taken several language courses at the University of Oslo, but at the time of his disappearance was a good way through writing his thesis for a master’s degree in history. He had written about a Nazi network during the war. A few weeks before he disappeared Reinhardt had told his supervisor, the renowned professor Johannes Heftye, that he had made a remarkable discovery that could indicate that parts of the network were still active.

One of the main leads in the investigation after this was an elderly, wealthy farmer called Henry Alfred Lien, a former convicted Nazi, who had been a member of the fascist Nasjonal Samling in Valdres. According to the thesis, he had been active in the network during the war. However, Lien proved to be ‘extremely uncommunicative’ in his meeting with the police in 1968. He claimed to have been at home on his farm a good few miles away on the night in question, and denied any knowledge of Falko Reinhardt’s disappearance.

He also threatened the police with legal action if anything was said to link his name to the case, so of course that never happened. There was no evidence that Falko Reinhardt had been the victim of a criminal act, and even less that Henry Alfred Lien was involved in his disappearance. To be on the safe side, and at his own cost, Lien had travelled to Oslo and taken a lie-detector test, during which he answered only two questions. The first was whether he had participated in the abduction of a student by the name of Falko Reinhardt. The second was whether he had been involved in the death of a student by the name of Falko Reinhardt. According to the attached certificate, the answer from the lie detector to both questions had been a clear no.

No other suspicious activity had been registered in the area on the night of the storm. A slightly sozzled youth on his way home from a birthday party a few miles further down the valley had tried, without success, to hitch a lift from a car that had sailed past him at high speed around four in the morning. He thought there had only been one person in the car, and his description of ‘a somewhat overweight man or woman of around forty’ was firstly too vague, and secondly bore no resemblance to Falko Reinhardt. As the tipsy young lad could not give a reliable description of either the driver or the car in the dark, his handwritten statement remained a simple appendix in the file.

And with that, the head of the investigation cautiously concluded that ‘there is currently no evidence to justify further investigation’, and the hunt for the truth regarding Falko Reinhardt’s fate came to a halt. The final documents in the file were two short letters from 1969 – a handwritten one from Falko Reinhardt’s parents, and a typed one from Marie Morgenstierne – which both complained about the perceived lack of police engagement in the case.

The investigation into the disappearance of Falko Reinhardt had taken place while I was on holiday and had been led by Detective Inspector Vegard Danielsen. He was the youngest detective inspector after me, and was possibly even more ambitious – and he was one of those endlessly irritating people who embody guile, but are also extremely competent.

In short, I did not particularly wish to discuss the Reinhardt case with Detective Inspector Vegard Danielsen, and was even less keen to involve him in any way in my investigation into the murder of Marie Morgenstierne. The idea of solving both cases right under his nose, with secret help from Patricia, was far more appealing. So I put the file to one side, but kept the exemplary list of the telephone numbers and addresses of the witnesses in the Falko Reinhardt case to hand, as it was currently the best starting point for establishing the truth about the murder of Marie Morgenstierne.

V

According to the file, Falko Reinhardt’s parents were Arno Reinhardt, a photographer, and his wife Astrid, who lived at the end of Seilduk Street in Grünerløkka.
‘NOTE: NORWEGIAN COMMUNIST PARTY!’
had been scribbled in the margin of the filing card in Detective Inspector Danielsen’s annoyingly neat handwriting.

I put the card with the two elderly Communist Party members to one side in favour of a list of the names of the four remaining members of the Socialist Youth League who had been with Falko Reinhardt and Marie Morgenstierne at the cabin in the mountains two years ago. It read:

1. Trond Ibsen, psychology student, born 1944.

2. Anders Pettersen, art student, born 1945.

3. Miriam Filtvedt Bentsen, literature and language student, born 1947.

4. Kristine Larsen, politics student, born 1945.

There were addresses and telephone numbers for all of them except the young Miriam Filtvedt Bentsen, whose address was given as a room at Sogn Halls of Residence.

I noticed immediately that Detective Inspector Danielsen, as the entrenched reactionary conservative he was, in addition to all his other unlikeable qualities, had written the students’ details down in alphabetical order but had put the men before the women. I was sitting pondering which order to contact them in when the phone on my desk solved my problem.

On the other end I heard one of the switchboard ladies say that there was a man on the line who said that he had potentially crucial information regarding the murder of Marie Morgenstierne. Then I heard a man introduce himself as ‘psychologist Trond Ibsen’. His voice was deep, calm and remarkably unrevolutionary. He told me that he had not been at Smestad station with Marie Morgenstierne, but had heard on the radio that a beautiful woman had been shot there, and feared it was her. So he felt he should report that not only was he a close friend of the deceased, but that he had also been with her at a political meeting in Smestad less than an hour before her death.

I thanked him for the information and said that I would like to meet him as soon as possible. He suggested that we should meet at Smestad. He had the keys to the place where the meeting had been held. I agreed and promised to meet him at the specified address at one o’clock.