Murder on the Thirty-First Floor (15 page)

He drank the mineral water slowly, in small gulps, and felt the liquid generate griping sensations and bubbling chain reactions in his empty stomach. After a while he got up and went to the toilet. By the urinal a well-dressed man was lying on his back
with one arm in the drainage channel. He stank of alcohol and had thrown up on his jacket and shirt. His eyes were open but his gaze was fixed and unseeing.

Jensen returned to the counter.

‘There’s an inebriated man in the urinal,’ he said.

The man behind the bar shrugged and continued to scan the row of brightly coloured TV screens.

Jensen showed his ID. The man immediately put down his comic and went over to the police telephone. All the food outlets had a direct line to the officer on radio duty at the nearest station.

The constables who came to fetch the drunk looked worn out from lack of sleep. When they carried the man out to arrest him, his head banged several times on the imitation marble floor. They were from a different police district, probably the eleventh, and did not recognise Inspector Jensen.

The clock showed five to twelve as the barman turned a timid look on his customers and began to close for the night. Jensen went out to the car and called the duty office in the Sixteenth District. The patrol had just returned from searching the flat.

‘Yes,’ said the head of the plainclothes patrol, ‘we found it.’

‘Intact?’

‘Yes, or at any rate, all the pages were there. There was a trampled frankfurter squashed between them, of course.’

Jensen sat in silence for a moment.

‘It took a long time,’ said the head of the plainclothes patrol, ‘but then, it wasn’t an easy job. What a dump. Millions of bits of paper.’

‘Make sure the owner of the flat is released in the normal way first thing tomorrow.’

‘Understood.’

‘One other thing.’

‘Yes, Inspector.’

‘Some years ago, the site security manager died in one of the lifts.’

‘Yes.’

‘Look into the circumstances. And find out what you can about the man, particularly his family situation. Be quick about it.’

‘Understood. Inspector?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think the police chief’s been trying to get hold of you.’

‘Did he leave a message?’

‘Not as far as I know.’

‘Goodnight.’

He hung up. Somewhere nearby, a clock struck twelve, a harsh, piercing peal.

The sixth day was over. He had exactly twenty-four hours left.

Inspector Jensen took it easy on the way home. He was physically tired, but knew he was going to find it very hard to sleep. Moreover, he only had a few hours left.

He did not meet a single vehicle in the long road tunnel, which was whitewashed and brightly lit, and further south the huge industrial area stood silent and deserted. The aluminium tanks and the Plexiglas roofs of the factories glinted in the moonlight.

On the bridge he was overtaken by a police van, with an ambulance right behind it. They were both driving fast, sirens whining.

Halfway along the motorway he had to stop at a police roadblock. The constable with the stop light clearly recognised him; when Jensen wound down the side window, the man stood to attention and said:

‘Traffic accident. One dead. The crash vehicle’s blocking the carriageway. We’ll have it clear in a few minutes.’

Jensen nodded. He sat with the window open, letting the raw night air stream into the car. While he waited, he thought about the accidents, declining in number from year to year while the number of fatalities continued to rise. The experts at the Ministry of Communications had long since solved this statistical conundrum. The decrease in collisions and material damage could to some extent be accounted for by better roads
and enhanced traffic surveillance. More important was the psychological factor: people had become more and more reliant on their cars, treating them with greater care and reacting almost subconsciously to the thought of losing them. The rising number of deaths was explained by the fact that most fatal crashes were really to be classified as suicide. Here, too, the psychological factor played a decisive role: people lived with and for their cars, and also wanted to die with them. This had been the finding of a study carried out some years before. It was marked top secret, but senior police officers had been given access to the information.

Eight minutes later, the carriageway was clear; he wound up the window and drove on. The road surface was covered with a fine layer of hoar frost, and at the crash site the tyre tracks were clearly visible in the arc lights. They showed no evidence of skidding or braking, but ran straight into a concrete column at the side of the road. The insurance would in all likelihood never be paid out. And yet, as always, the possibility remained that the driver had been tired and had fallen asleep at the wheel.

Inspector Jensen felt vaguely dissatisfied, as if there were something missing. When he tried to analyse the phenomenon, he became aware of a hollow feeling of hunger. He parked the car outside the seventh tower block in the third row, went to the snack vending machine and pressed the button for a packet of a powdered nutrition drink for dieters.

Up in the flat he hung up his outdoor clothes and jacket and switched on the light. Then he pulled down the window blinds, went into the kitchen, measured thirty centilitres of water into a pan and whisked in the powder. When the drink was hot, he poured it into a teacup and went back to the main room, put the cup on his bedside table, sat on the bed and
unlaced his shoes. The clock showed a quarter past two, and the whole block of flats was silent. He still had a sense that something was missing.

He fetched his spiral-bound notebook from his jacket pocket, switched on the reading lamp above his bed and turned off the overhead light. Sipping the nutrition drink, he read slowly and systematically through his notes. The drink was thick and sticky and had a stale, insipid taste.

Once he had finished reading, he raised his eyes and looked at one of the framed photographs from the police training college. He was in the picture, second from the right in the back row. He was standing with his arms folded, smiling a fuzzy smile. He must have been saying something to the person next to him just as the photographer took the picture.

A little while later, he stood up and went out into the hall. He opened the wardrobe door and took one of the bottles that were lined up along the back, behind the police caps on the hat shelf. Then he went to get a glass from the kitchen, filled it almost to the brim with spirits and put it beside the cup of instant gruel.

He unfolded the list of the nine names and put it in front of him on the table. He sat motionless, studying it.

The electric clock on the wall marked the time with three short rings.

Inspector Jensen turned to a new page of the notebook and wrote: Number 6, age 38, divorced, PR man, transferred to other activities.

As he noted down the address, he gave an almost imperceptible shake of the head.

Then he set the alarm clock, put out the light and undressed. He pulled on his pyjamas and sat on the bed with the blanket
over his legs. The gruel seemed to swell up in his stomach and he felt as if something was pressing upwards against his heart.

He picked up his tumbler and drained it in two draughts. The spirit, sixty-three per cent proof, burnt into his tongue and sank down his throat like a pillar of fire.

He lay on his back in the dark, eyes wide open, waiting for rest.

Inspector Jensen did not fall asleep. From three o’clock to twenty past five he lay in a sort of stupor, unable to think clearly and yet incapable of disconnecting his thought processes. When the alarm clock rang, he felt queasy and found he was drenched in sweat. Forty minutes later, he was sitting in the car.

The place he had to get to lay two hundred kilometres to the north, and since it was Sunday he reckoned he ought to be there in three hours.

The city was silent and desolate, its multi-storey car parks empty and its parking spaces naked, but the traffic lights worked away as usual and as he drove through the centre he found himself stopping for ten red lights.

The motorway was straight, the driving trouble-free, and the scenery on either side uninteresting. Here and there he saw distant suburbs or self-clearance estates silhouetted against the sky. From the horizon to the motorway, the ground was covered in an expanse of dry and dreary vegetation: deformed trees and low, scrubby bushes.

At eight o’clock, Inspector Jensen turned into a service station to fill up with petrol. He also drank a cup of lukewarm tea and made two phone calls.

The head of the plainclothes patrol sounded tired and hoarse, and had clearly been roused from his sleep.

‘It was nineteen years ago,’ he said. ‘The man got stuck in a lift and was crushed to death.’

‘Have we still got the file on the case?’

‘Only a routine investigation noted in the log. It was evidently an open and shut case. A pure accident seemed the likeliest explanation, a chance cut in the power supply which made the lift stop for a couple of minutes and then start again of its own accord. And anyway, the man seems to have been entirely useless.’

‘And his surviving relatives?’

‘He had no family. Lived in a bachelors hostel.’

‘Did he leave anything?’

‘Yes. A pretty large sum of money, actually.’

‘Who inherited?’

‘No relatives came forward within the prescribed time. In the end the money went to some state fund or other.’

‘Anything else?’

‘Nothing that seems significant. The fellow was a recluse, lived alone, had no friends.’

‘Goodbye.’

The man who had been sent to go through the newspaper archives was also at home.

‘Jensen here.’

‘Yes, Inspector.’

‘Any results?’

‘Didn’t you get my report, sir?’

‘No.’

‘I handed it in yesterday afternoon.’

‘Give me a verbal report now.’

‘Yes of course,’ said the man. ‘Just a minute while I try to remember.’

‘Yes.’

‘The cut-out letters that were used all come from the same paper, but not all from the same day. They were taken from two different issues, the Friday and the Saturday papers of last week. The typeface is called Bodoni.’

Jensen got out his spiral-bound notebook and wrote the information on the inside cover.

‘Anything else?’

The man was quiet for a moment. Then he said:

‘Yes, one more thing. The required combination of letters and text on the back page wasn’t in all the editions of the paper. It was only in the so-called A edition.’

‘Which implies what?’

‘It means that the letters were only in the copies of the paper that were printed last. The ones that are sent out to vendors and subscribers here in the city.’

‘You’re released from the investigation,’ said Inspector Jensen. ‘Return to normal duties. Goodbye.’

He hung up, went out to the car and drove on.

At nine he passed through a densely built up area, quiet at this early hour on a Sunday, but consisting of perhaps a thousand identical terraced houses, grouped in a rectangle round a factory. From the factory chimneys rose fluffy columns of yellowish smoke. A hundred or so metres in the air, the vapour cloud flattened out and sank back down over the community.

A quarter of an hour later he was at his destination.

So his calculation of the journey time had proved correct. The stop at the petrol station must have taken about fifteen minutes.

The house was a modern weekend cottage, with large
picture windows and a roof of corrugated plastic. It lay on a hillside three kilometres east of the motorway, surrounded by trees. At the bottom of the hill there were glimpses of a lake of dirty brown water. The air was fouled by the stench of the factory.

On the concrete area in front of the house stood a plumpish man in his dressing gown and slippers. He seemed sluggish and lethargic, and regarded his visitor without enthusiasm. Inspector Jensen showed his ID.

‘Inspector Jensen from the Sixteenth District. I’m conducting an investigation that has to do with your former employment and place of work.’

‘What do you want?’

‘A few questions.’

‘All right, come in,’ he said.

The two rooms contained a number of rugs, ashtrays and items of steel furniture that looked as if they had been transported there from the publishing house.

Jensen took out his notebook and pen.

‘When did you cease your employment?’

The other man stifled a yawn and looked about him, as if trying to avoid something.

‘Three months ago,’ he said finally.

‘Why did you leave?’

The man regarded Jensen. There was a musing look in his shallow-set grey eyes. He seemed to be weighing up whether to answer or not. At length he waved a vague hand and said:

‘If it’s the diploma you want to see, I haven’t got it here.’

Jensen said nothing.

‘I left it in my wife’s flat in town.’

‘Why did you leave?’

The man furrowed his brow as if trying to concentrate. Eventually he said:

‘Listen, whatever you’ve heard and whatever you’re imagining, it’s wrong. I can’t help you with anything.’

A few seconds passed in silence. The man rubbed the tip of his nose unhappily.

‘I haven’t really left. My contract with the company has expired, admittedly, but I’m still linked to the group.’

‘What work are you doing?’

Jensen looked around the bare room. The other man followed his gaze. After another silence, longer than the first, the man said:

‘Listen, what’s the point of all this? I don’t know anything that could be of any use to you. I swear the diploma’s still in town.’

‘Why would I want to see your diploma?’

‘Don’t ask me. It seems very odd that you’d drive two hundred kilometres for a thing like that.’

The man shook his head.

‘How long did it take you, by the way?’

He said it with a hint of interest, but Jensen did not reply and the man reverted to his earlier tone.