The Human Flies (K2 and Patricia series) (24 page)

Konrad Jensen had an old wireless, but no television. It did not look like he subscribed to any newspapers, but instead bought
VG
,
Dagbladet
and
Aftenposten
on particular days. Last month’s newspapers were stacked on the floor. Several of them were folded at the sports pages. The bookshelf boasted a worn Bible and a fairly random selection of other books. In a drawer in the kitchen, I found a collection of car pictures cut out from magazines together with a bank book and some other personal papers. A small pile of football-pools coupons lay abandoned and it seemed that Konrad Jensen did not spend much time on them and had never been particularly successful either. Eight right was the highest he had ever achieved, according to his own notes.

I found myself wondering what the dead man had done in all the thousands of hours that he must have spent here over the years – in addition to eating, smoking and cursing his fate. It struck me that perhaps no one other than him had been in the flat for years, before this murder case forced me on him. The questions remained: had Konrad Jensen been on his own here when he died this morning, or had another person been here with him?

Konrad Jensen’s bedroom was equally sparsely furnished and impregnated with smoke. A half-full ashtray stood on the stool that he had positioned to act as a bedside table. I wondered whether a woman had ever shared the bed. There was much to indicate that if one had, it was many years ago.

There were two pairs of trousers and two jackets hanging in the wardrobe, as well as three shirts and three sets of underwear. An old black suit lay crumpled on a shelf on its own. It was very possible that it had not been used for a good few years. No one was likely to invite Konrad Jensen anywhere he might need to wear a suit, and he was even less likely to go to such places of his own accord. I despondently picked up the suit jacket – and jumped when something fell out of it.

It was a quite large and thick brown envelope. There was nothing written on the outside. Inside, there was a sheaf of white papers with blue text, handwritten by Konrad Jensen. I immediately took them with me out to the table in the living room. I sat there for almost an hour looking through the fifty pages or so left by the man who had died here in his chair this morning.

It was not what I would have expected to find in this flat: it was an attempt to write a book.

Having had years to ponder his fate in silence, Konrad Jensen had obviously decided to write down his thoughts. There were around twenty pages about his childhood and youth, and about twenty pages or so about the war. Having ploughed my way through it, it was with some disappointment that I had to accept that there was no information here that was of any use to the investigation. Not a word was said about Harald Olesen, nor was there anything about Deerfoot. It was a very self-centred and self-righteous story of a young man who had felt misunderstood all his life and found it hard to accept his lack of success.

My suspicion that Norway had not lost a great literary talent with Konrad Jensen’s death was confirmed before I had even finished the first page. The structure was chaotic, it was unfocused, and the punctuation and grammar were appalling. Paragraphs and headings appeared to be unknown quantities to Konrad Jensen. This attempt by an unknown and menial member of the NS was hardly a project that any publisher would dare to take on, by an author no one would spend tuppence on. But Konrad Jensen had put a lot of work into it. The dates of writing were jotted down in the margin, and he had written nearly every day since November last year. The last section, about the end of the war, was dated 3 April – the day before Harald Olesen was murdered.

I put the papers down with the reinforced feeling that Patricia had been right and that Konrad Jensen had been murdered. How pathetic it all was that Konrad Jensen had died and left behind a life lie, as described by Ibsen, one of our greatest writers – a project that he was working on and had great hopes for. But I was also aware that this was entirely based on my intuition and would hardly stand up in court or the media.

As I was about to put the papers back into the envelope, the first sentence caught my eye: ‘I Konrad Jensen hearby start my life story that I do not regreat.’

I sat staring at this single sentence.

Konrad Jensen had only a couple of months ago written by hand and misspelled the words ‘hereby’ and ‘regret’. In the typewritten letter, both words were spelled correctly.

It could of course be the case that he had learned to spell both words correctly later, but Konrad Jensen’s manuscript was written without a comma and with frequent misspellings of the simplest words. This was also the case with the last notes, made only a few days ago. Patricia had been absolutely right in her assumptions about his writing. It was simply not possible to imagine that the same man had written a suicide note on a typewriter with perfect spelling and grammar.

I put the papers down on the table with care. Then I went out into Konrad Jensen’s kitchen and washed my face with ice-cold water, twice. Afterwards, I was still convinced that Konrad Jensen had been murdered – and still furiously determined to catch this incredibly cold-blooded and cynical murderer. I picked up the manuscript that was his testament and quietly left Konrad Jensen’s flat, asking the caretaker’s wife to make sure the door was locked behind me.

Then I drove home and phoned Patricia. At half past nine in the evening, she was immediately alert when she heard the news. It was a short and optimistic conversation, in sharp contrast to the long, pessimistic one we had had earlier in the day. I promised not to close the investigation – certainly not until after the Easter weekend. She promised me that with our combined efforts, we would definitely catch the murderer.

I went to bed on the sixth day of the investigation in an invigorated mood, my mind teeming with thoughts. It was two o’clock in the morning before I closed my eyes, but the final hours of the day brought no breakthrough. My last thought before I fell asleep was about what Harald Olesen’s will might hold. The last face I saw before I fell asleep was, for a change, that of Konrad Jensen. He stared at me, grim and unhappy as usual. I looked at him questioningly, without getting an answer. It seemed to me that his expression was particularly malcontented, and he shook his head without saying a word when I said something about recording his death as suicide. But by then I was no doubt fast asleep.

DAY SEVEN

A Will – and Its Impact

I

The first two hours in the office on Wednesday, 10 April were fairly uneventful and involved a lot of gratifying reading in the papers. At twenty-five past ten, however, there was a loud, impatient knock on my door. Outside stood an unusually breathless ballistics expert with a very bewildered expression on his face.

‘The report is ready, but I must warn you that the conclusion is perhaps not what you had hoped,’ he blurted out.

I was prepared and indicated that he should continue, expectant. He carried on in an unsteady voice.

‘The bullet that killed Konrad Jensen came from the .45-calibre revolver that was found in the flat, the last Kongsberg Colt model from 1947. But . . .’

The ballistics expert paused for a moment. I kept a straight face and helped him by finishing the sentence.

‘But the bullet that killed Harald Olesen came from another, possibly older .45-calibre gun, so we are still missing the murder weapon.’

He nodded, dumbfounded, and looked at me in admiration.

‘As you perhaps understand, I had reason to believe that was the case, so it is excellent that you could confirm it so quickly. Can you tell me any more about the missing revolver?’

He nodded eagerly and hurried to continue.

‘It is also a Kongsberg Colt, but as you said, an older model. It is hard to say how much older. The first model was mass-produced from 1918 until the war, but very few were actually produced after 1930. So I would guess that the gun that killed Harald Olesen was probably from around 1920. The .45-calibre Kongsberg Colt was used a lot in those days, not least by the army. There were still a considerable number of these guns in use during and just after the war, but this early type then became less popular.’

I nodded thoughtfully and said that that fitted very well with one theory. Which it no doubt did, only I unfortunately had no idea what the theory was.

The pathologist phoned shortly after. His results were less dramatic, but not without interest. The exact time of death was still uncertain, given the temperature of the room. However, it was clear that the fatal shot was fired later than first assumed. It was not before nine or after one, so was presumably fired sometime between ten and twelve.

The typewriter lead I could check myself, and as expected, it had not led to anything. Konrad Jensen’s suicide note was written on one of the most common typewriters on sale in Norway. According to the itinerary from the first house searches, there were three typewriters in the building: the Lunds’ typewriter was of the same model as the one that the suicide note had been written on, whereas Sara Sundqvist’s and Andreas Gullestad’s were not. But there was not much to be had from this, as the model in question was so common that it could be found in practically any office. The same typewriter might be used in an embassy, a sports shop or a university.

Having given it some thought for a good ten minutes, there was really only one person who I could not imagine had written the letter on a typewriter in the course of the past few days, and that was Konrad Jensen. The realization that he had not shot himself dug deeper and deeper into my conscience. And my desire to find the cold-blooded man or woman who had weaselled his or her way in to this lonely man’s flat to kill him grew ever stronger.

At a quarter past eleven, my impatience drove me to call the fingerprint expert, who had just returned from Konrad Jensen’s flat. He had found my own prints on the door, as well as those of the caretaker’s wife and Konrad Jensen, but that was all. I thanked him for his work, and made a mental note that technical evidence would not be enough to catch the murderer in this case.

II

A tense atmosphere already prevailed when I arrived at the conference room of the law firm Rønning, Rønning & Rønning in Idun Street fifteen minutes before the will was due to be read. Neither Rønning Junior nor the will was to be seen in the room, which held six rows of chairs with table arms, as well as a small podium with a lectern. A good number of the deceased’s neighbours and relatives were already present. Mr and Mrs Lund were sitting on their own to the far left of the front row, and Harald Olesen’s niece and nephew were sitting in the third row. The caretaker’s wife had just pushed in Andreas Gullestad in his wheelchair and seated herself considerately behind him in the fourth row. She swiftly packed her worn winter coat away in a nylon net bag.

All of the residents who were present nodded or waved to me when I came into the room. I did a quiet tour and shook them all by the hand. The caretaker’s wife was excited but controlled. Andreas Gullestad was as calm and smiling as ever: he did not have anything to get excited about. Mrs Lund seemed a little uneasy about the situation and kept looking around the room, whereas Kristian Lund kept a stiff upper lip. I found myself admiring his stoicism, which quickly broke when Sara Sundqvist came in at ten minutes to twelve. She sat down demonstratively on her own to the right of the back row and seemed to avoid looking at the Lunds.

At four minutes to midday, the doorway was suddenly filled with the handsome figure of Darrell Williams. He arrived at full speed, wearing a fur coat, and sat down without any pleasantries in the back row, on the chair nearest the door. All of those there turned round instinctively when they heard the door, and the other neighbours gave him a brief nod. I noticed that the Olesen siblings positively stared at him, and that the niece in particular looked at him for a long time before turning back round. I did not find this in the slightest bit strange, as they were unlikely to have seen him before. Furthermore, the arrival of Darrell Williams was shortly overshadowed by the arrival of a slightly smaller, much thinner man, who three minutes later stepped up onto the podium with a large sealed envelope in his hands.

It had already occurred to me that Mr Rønning Junior was likely to milk the situation for all it was worth. He did not disappoint. At exactly one minute to midday, the young man had entered the room with a pince-nez, an unusually self-conscious expression and an undoubtedly extremely expensive suit. He would have fitted into 1920s Norway without raising any eyebrows, and this impression was reinforced when he then opened his mouth, as his language was extremely conservative and precise. However, the man’s immaculate and irritating image was upstaged by the large sealed envelope he held in his hand, which he opened with deliberate, slow movements as soon as the clock started to strike twelve. A profound silence reigned in the room until the twelve chimes were over.

‘On behalf of the deceased Harald Olesen’s estate, I would firstly like to thank you all for taking the time to be here, as requested in an appendix to the aforementioned will. Furthermore, we can confirm that all those invited are present, with the exception of Mr Konrad Jensen, who is unable to attend as he died yesterday, as I am sure you are all aware.’

The room was so still you could hear a pin drop. I stared at the lawyer with horrified fascination.

‘Harald Olesen died a widower with no living parents or known heirs. In this situation, he was legally free to divide his estate and assets as desired in a will. These comprise his flat in 25 Krebs’ Street and contents, with an estimated value of 70,000 kroner, and a cabin outside Stokke in Horten, which his nephew has used for the past few years, with an estimated value of 40,000 kroner. He also had cash holdings in a bank account that amount to 1,122,434 kroner, when the lawyer’s fee and other fees and taxes have been deducted. And finally, the sum of 263 kroner and 75 øre was found in cash in his wallet.’