She had been sitting at the kitchen table with a magazine open at the crossword and a half-empty cup of coffee beside it. I pulled out a wicker chair, sat down and had a quick look round the room before taking out my notebook and assuming an official air.
The room had a sort of half-hearted feminine look about it, with clear signs that it had been furnished by two different people with utterly different tastes. One of them had a preference for large flowery patterns in the curtains, the other for a kind of simple, almost cryptic style, represented in the wallpaper.
‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ she asked, and when I nodded, I had the pleasure of seeing her stretch to take a mug from one of the shelves in the kitchen cupboard. Under her dressing gown she was wearing tight-fitting teenage-style pyjama trousers in pink cotton with small flowers, and she had stuffed her bare feet into deep red slippers with big pompoms on them, borrowed from some diva she had forgotten to return them to. Unless, that is, it was Gro Anita they belonged to. I wasn’t in any particular doubt about which of them liked flowers and pompoms, and which had the simpler style.
She poured coffee from a pale yellow flask, pushed the magazine out of the way and looked at me inquiringly.
I nodded towards the half-finished crossword. ‘That’s just what a sudden death is like. A long row of unanswered questions and a form you have to fill in bit-by-bit, down and across, until – if you’re lucky and have a good dictionary – you’ve completed it. Filled out what actually happened.’
She shifted uneasily. She felt her forehead with the back of her hand as though to emphasise the fact that she had a temperature. Her lips were dry and cracked with white blotches against the darker flesh.
‘And there are still some clues we haven’t found answers to,’ I went on.
She fluttered her eyelashes, not from any attempt to make an impression but rather like someone suddenly emerging into very harsh daylight. Yet still she said nothing.
‘As I was saying … not to beat about the bush … You were the one who found him, weren’t you?’
She nodded, shifting her gaze to the window. The pigeon was no longer there, as if it had sensed danger. The same snowflakes fell steadily over the city as though from a never-ending supply, but did not stick, because the thermometer was still a fraction above zero.
‘Can you tell me what happened?’
When she eventually spoke it was so softly that I had to lower my head to hear what she said. ‘I don’t know what had gone on in there … I just – found him.’
‘Yes, I see, but … You knew he was there, did you?’
‘Yes, we’d been told that the room was taken till two o’clock.’
‘Was that normal?’
Her gaze shifted again. ‘Y-yes … It often happens that guests need the rooms a bit longer.’
‘Yes, but I meant … you’d seen the judge before, hadn’t you?’
‘Yes, he … they said he often had important meetings there … conferences.’
‘Mm.’ I looked reassuringly at her.
‘So … I’d seen him there before.’
‘And … did you see who he had these – meetings with before?’
‘Er, sometimes … Yes.’
‘Was it – men?’
She did not answer.
‘Women?’
She nodded.
‘Different women?’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Er, maybe.’
‘Young women?’
She pursed her lips.
‘Very young?’
A further nod. ‘I’ll say!’
‘Oh?’
‘No, I just meant, you wouldn’t have caught me doing it! Even if they paid me a fortune!’
‘Yes, that’s probably what most people would think.’
‘The old pig! He got no more than he –’ She stopped herself abruptly, horrified at what she had just been about to say.
I took out the newspaper cutting showing a picture of Torild Skagestøl, put it on the kitchen table and pushed it over to her. ‘This girl here, was she one of them?’
She glanced quickly at the picture, almost as though she was afraid of being recognised. She nodded faintly. Then she leaned closer and had a good look at it before nodding with much greater conviction. ‘Hair a bit different maybe, and a much more brazen look on her face but – yes …’ She looked me straight in the eye. ‘I’m sure it’s her!’
I leaned forwards. ‘Sure it was her the day we’re talking about as well?’
She looked uncertain. ‘Er, I think so, but … I didn’t see her so clearly that day, but – it was nearly always her! Quite a few times. I’m sure of it now … When she passed me, well, us, in the corridor, she just looked straight at us with the most brazen look you can imagine – as if we, as if we didn’t get what she was up to in there, as if we didn’t know what she was!’
I felt a strange buzz, a mixture of satisfaction and fear. Satisfaction at what I’d already figured out; fear at what it could only imply. ‘But … OK. Let’s go back to the day we’re talking about – last Friday, right?’
She confirmed it with a faint nod.
‘Tell me how it was that you … that you found him.’
She pushed her large glasses back up the bridge of her nose but hadn’t got many words out before they’d slipped back down. ‘It was her I saw first … She was … she seemed in a real hurry because on her way to the lift she was still tucking her blouse into her slacks, but when she – saw me …’
‘Yes?’
‘I was just coming out of a room at the end of the corridor, and … when she saw me, she turned straight back as though …’ She searched for the right expression. ‘Well, she didn’t want to be seen, in a way. Then she disappeared round the corner where she must definitely have taken the stairs instead.’
‘Did her behaviour strike you as unusual?’
‘Yes, but not in that way …’
‘Was that when you went into their room?’
‘No, no, it wasn’t two o’clock yet, and they had the room …’ She lost the thread of what she was saying.
‘I see. And then?’
‘Then – I did the other rooms.’
‘What time was it when you got to Brandt’s room, then?’
‘I didn’t look at my watch – twenty past two, something like that, according to what the police said. At any rate it was twenty-five past two when they were telephoned from reception.’
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘Nothing happened. When I went to the room I knocked and waited, the way we’re always supposed to. But he could have gone while I was doing one of the other rooms, so … when there was no reply I let myself in with the key.’ She put her hand over her mouth as though the memory of what she had seen there was so strong that she involuntarily had to go through her own physical reactions again.
‘First it was so quiet that I was sure he’d left. But there was a smell, a smell I couldn’t identify … and when I got right into the room, there he lay, on the bed, in a really contorted position, wearing just, just … I had to be sick, so I dashed into the loo, but nothing came up. It was just my stomach turning, my whole diaphragm heaving, it hurt so. I think that’s what made me sick now I come to think of it.’
‘That’s not impossible.’
‘I never wear any stuff like that myself … I mean, black, it seems kinky to me.’
I didn’t comment on that aspect. ‘Was there anything in the room to indicate what had been going on there?’
‘Well, it looked as though there’d been a party. They’d helped themselves to beer from the mini-bar, and there were pillows – on the floor, one of the chairs had been knocked over, and in the bathroom …’
‘Yes?’
‘Just behind the toilet bowl, I saw it when I was bending over to be sick, there was a bottle lying on the floor, an empty – bottle of tablets.’
‘What did you do with it?’
She looked at me wide-e
yed. ‘Do with it? I told the police, of course!’
‘Was there anything on the label?’
‘Do you really think I looked at it? It was all I could do to stand up. What I needed was – well …’
I drained my coffee. ‘Was there anything else in the room you particularly noticed?’
‘Nothing except what he’d … He’d tried to write something on the wall …’
‘What? He’d tried to write something?’
‘At first I thought it was blood that he’d smeared around, but then … There was no blood apart from that, and I … then I realised it was lipstick.’
She looked at me with an air of intense unease. ‘He’d painted himself, worse than the worst …’ She ran her fingers round her lips as though to show what she meant.
‘So he’d tried to write something, with the lipstick?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was it?’
‘First it looked just like a few squiggles, but later … it was a letter.’
‘A letter! Which one?’
‘A big – “T”.’
Eighteen
SOURCES ARE, if anything, more important in my line than they are for the press and protected by just as strict a code of confidentiality. Maybe that was why I had so many useful contacts in the dailies.
The editorial world was a labyrinth, and a well-lit one, not so much because it was supposed to be difficult to find one’s way through it but to make room for as many people as possible in the currently available space.
I found Laila Mongstad in a little cubicle at the far end, with half a window facing the back of the Social Sciences block in Foss-winckels Street and the Catholic school in the next building. It was almost four years now since, at a surprisingly late stage in her career, she had been poached from the paper’s more radical cousin in Christian Michelsens Street and had long confirmed her reputation as a such a first-class reporter on social affairs that the paper had already been in the dock twice to answer libel charges following some of her revelations.
Perhaps it was all the dirt she spent her time digging up that had made her previously generous smile slightly frayed at the edges; or perhaps it was just age claiming its due. She’d kept up quite a pace over a career of thirty or forty years in newspapers, and, despite the fact that her blue-grey eyes were still full of energy and dynamism, I quickly calculated that she’d certainly turned sixty since we’d last had something special going. And we’d never really got any further than that.
The smile she gave me betrayed nothing. Her eggshell-blue silk blouse emphasised her large breasts, but I noted that she had done up the lower buttons of her red cardigan, most likely to camouflage the size of her waist above the tight-fitting dark-blue slacks.
‘How are you?’ I began cautiously.
‘Is this a friendly visit, or is it work?’ she answered, swivelling her chair away from the computer keyboard she was using.
‘Both.’
‘In that case, you’d better sit down.’
‘Thanks. Which shall we start with?’
She gave a crooked smile. ‘Which’ll take longer?’
‘I’m sure you know about – that girl they’ve found up on Fanafjell …’
‘Holger’s daughter. It’s dreadful. But …’
‘She’d been missing for a whole week, and I … I was hired two days ago to try and find her.’
‘I see. You got there too late?’
‘I wasn’t even close – but I did find something out.’
‘Oh?’
‘One of the places I learned she’d hung out in a good deal is an amusement arcade called Jimmy’s.’
She pulled a face. ‘Jimmy’s …’
‘Know the place?’
She pulled out a drawer in her desk. ‘How did you find out that she hung out there?’
‘One of her girlfriends said so.’
‘It doesn’t necessarily mean anything, of course, but …’
She had taken a large beige envelope out of the drawer. Now she opened it and tipped about twenty black-and-white enlargements onto the desk. ‘One of our photographers took these from a parked car at the beginning of January.’
She pushed four of the pictures over to me.
I looked at them. They showed the entrance to Jimmy’s. A young girl was coming out. In the next picture she was walking along the pavement, as the dark shadow of a moving car came into the picture from the right. In the third picture she stood half leaning over, looking into the car, and in the fourth she was climbing into the passenger seat beside the driver.
The car’s number plate had been touched up and was quite legible. I glanced up at Lalla Mongstad. ‘Have you checked out who the car owner is?’
She nodded.
‘And – ?’
She looked around and leaned so close that I caught a hint of her perfume, a fresh, sap-like scent. ‘A not entirely unknown local politician … You know who Hallstein Grindheim is, don’t you?’
‘The Christian People’s Party man?’
‘Unfortunately, you can’t see the driver.’
‘You mean you don’t know who the driver was?’
‘No.’
I looked at the other pictures. ‘Are there more like these?’
She leafed through a few pictures before taking three out and pushing them over to me.
One of them was almost identical to the first one I’d seen. It showed another young girl coming out of Jimmy’s. The next one showed her walking along the pavement in another street. I had to look closer at a couple of the hoardings to identify where it was. The third showed her going through the main entrance of the same hotel I’d visited myself a few hours before.
‘And then?’ I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘There’s a limit to how far we can follow this up, but … a rendezvous in one of the rooms?’ She handed me a fourth picture. ‘Here she’s on her way out two hours later.’
‘Where did she go then?’
‘To the bus station and then took the last bus home.’
‘But your paper hasn’t written about this yet, as far as I recall.’
‘No. At the moment we’re just gathering background material. When we come out with this stuff we must have cast-iron evidence to back it up.’
‘Excellent. What more do you know? I take it your people have been poking around at Jimmy’s too?’
‘You know who owns the place?’
I hesitated. ‘No, but since you say it like that … it’s Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, isn’t it?’
‘No, but you’re on the right track. The initials are the same.’
‘Birger Bjelland?’
‘Mm.’
‘Does this mean, in other words, that something can be pinned on the guy at last?’
She pouted sceptically. ‘Mm. Maybe we should put it like this … A long time ago he showed that he has as many lives as a cat. We can possibly shorten his life account by one if this really nails him.’
‘What about Hallstein Grindheim? Have you confronted him with the pictures?’
‘Not yet. But if we can only get him full frontal, he’s going to find it on the front page!’
‘With clothes or without?’
She bared her teeth, and I noticed how pointed her eye teeth seemed. ‘Without as well …’
‘But to come back to Jimmy’s, have you lot been to take a look around there?’
‘I’m too old and the wrong sex, in any case.’
‘But – ?’
‘Sure, I do have younger colleagues with the right calibre between their legs.’ She looked at me provocatively as though to intimate that I perhaps didn’t match up to her standards in that department. ‘But it’s hard to put your finger on anything specific. From the outside it looks like a normal amusement arcade. Most of those playing the machines are boys, and, of course, we don’t rule out the possibility that there might be some – traffic there too, but … it looks as though girls are the special
ity, especially teenagers. They probably recruit the grown-up girls from somewhere else.’
‘The bar at the Week End Hotel, for instance?’
‘That hotel’s also changed its name recently, so … yes.’
‘Oh really? Very recently?’
‘Somebody’s bought out the family.’
‘Somebody?’
‘And it’s not Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson either.’
‘I see. So what do they call the hotel now? The Secret Garden?’
‘Is it a while since you ate?’
‘Yes.’
‘Pastel.’
‘So they’ve painted it as well, have they?’
She nodded.
‘I’m going to throw up.’
‘That’s why I asked …’
‘Mm. Well …’ I threw up my hands. ‘In other words, you’re strongly suggesting that Jimmy’s operates as a sort of procuring joint?’
‘Yes, I am – unfortunately.’
‘And how does it all work?’
‘Via a phone call to whoever’s on duty behind the counter. He writes something on a pad, and after a while the message is discreetly passed to whichever of the girls is in line for an – assignment.’
‘Then some of them are fetched by car, while others meet at a prearranged rendezvous?’
‘Something like that.’
I leafed through the photos again, trying to read the expressions on the faces of the two young girls. You could see from their build that they were two different girls, but the photos were too indistinct to make out who they were.
I put aside one of the photos from the series ending at the hotel entrance. Then I pushed it over to her. ‘Could this be – Torild Skagestøl?’
She looked at me thoughtfully before picking up the picture and holding it away from her. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever set eyes on her … but some of the others could be …’ She glanced back at me. ‘Do you think there’s a direct link between this and the fact that she was killed?’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time a …’ I was reluctant to use the word. ‘That something like this has happened to a – prostitute, would it?’
‘No, you’re quite right there.’ She suddenly looked worried. ‘Ought I to inform the editorial board about this?’
The Writing on the Wall Page 10