Murder on the Thirty-First Floor (17 page)

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Have you still got it?’

‘I assume so. Do you want to see it?’

Jensen did not reply. For a full minute he sat motionless, not looking at the man. Then he said:

‘Do you admit to sending an anonymous and threatening letter to the group management?’

‘When am I supposed to have done that?’

‘At about this time, a week ago.’

The man had pulled up his trousers and crossed his legs. He sat with his left elbow resting on the arm of the chair, and stroked his bottom lip slowly with his index finger.

‘No,’ he said calmly. ‘I don’t admit to that.’

Inspector Jensen opened his mouth to say something but appeared to change his mind. He looked at his watch instead. It said 19.11.

‘I assume I’m not the first one you’ve spoken to in connection with this. How many people have you … interviewed before me?’

His tone had a bit more life in it.

‘About ten,’ said Inspector Jensen.

‘All from the publishing house?’

‘Yes.’

‘What you must have had to sit through in the way of anecdotes and scabrous tall stories. Slander. Half-truths, cantankerous grumbles, insinuations. And falsified versions of events.’

Jensen said nothing.

‘The whole Skyscraper is seething with that sort of stuff, from what I’ve heard,’ said the man.

‘But then perhaps that’s what most places are like,’ he added pensively.

‘What post did you hold in your time with the group?’

‘I was employed to report on culture and the arts. I held the same post, as you put it, throughout my time there.’

‘Did you gain insight into the organisation and activities of the publishing house?’

‘To some extent. Are you thinking of anything in particular?’

‘Do you know of something called Department 31?’

‘Yes.’

‘And do you know what they do there?’

‘I ought to. I spent fifteen years and four months in Department 31.’

There was a minute or so of silence, then Jensen said almost casually:

‘Do you admit to sending an anonymous and threatening letter to the group management?’

The man ignored the question.

‘Department 31, or the Special Department as it’s also known, is the most important in the whole publishing house.’

‘So I’ve heard people say. What does it do?’

‘Nothing,’ said the man. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

‘Explain.’

The man stood up and went to get a sheet of paper and a pencil from the meticulously tidy desk. He sat down, lined the sheet of paper up exactly with the pattern on the desktop and laid the pen parallel with the top of the sheet. Then he looked enquiringly at his visitor.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I shall explain.’

Jensen looked at his watch. 19.29. The time left to him had shrunk to four and a half hours.

‘Are you in a hurry, Inspector?’

‘Yes. Be quick.’

‘I’ll try to keep it brief. You asked what the Special Department did, isn’t that so?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ve already given you a comprehensive answer: nothing. The more I develop the answer, the less comprehensive it becomes. Unfortunately. Do you see?’

‘No.’

‘Of course not. Hopefully you will do. If not, we’ll be at an impasse.’

The man said nothing for half a minute, and in that time his expression went through several changes. When he started speaking again, he seemed somehow weak and uncertain, but more committed than before.

‘The simplest thing is probably for me to tell you about myself. I grew up in an intellectual home and was educated in the liberal tradition. My father was a university lecturer, and I spent ten terms at the Academy myself. The Academy had a humanities faculty back then, in more than name only. Do you understand fully what that meant?’

‘No.’

‘I can’t explain everything. It would take us too far. It’s conceivable you’ve forgotten the meaning of the terms I’m using, but you must have heard them at some time. Consequently, you’ll gradually start to understand their implications and see the whole picture.’

Jensen put down his pen and listened.

‘As I told you before, I became an arts correspondent, initially because I didn’t think I had it in me to be an author. I wasn’t good enough, to put it simply, even though writing was vitally important to me. It was almost my only passion.’

He paused. Light rain pattered on the windows.

‘I worked as an arts editor on a privately owned newspaper for many years. Its pages not only provided information about art, literature, music and so on, they also left room for debate. For me, as for some other people, the debate was perhaps the most important element. It was broad in its scope, spanning virtually every aspect of society. It was often sharply critical, and not all the views expressed and points made were thoroughly thought through, not by any means.’

Jensen started to move.

‘Stop,’ said the man, and held up his right hand. ‘I think I know what you’re going to say. Yes, that’s right, it did disturb people, and quite often dismayed or disappointed them, made them angry or frightened. It didn’t try to placate anybody, be they institutions, ideas or individuals. We, that’s to say I and a few others, thought that was only right.’

Jensen carried through his move, checking the time. 19.45.

‘It’s claimed,’ the man said thoughtfully, ‘that criticism and violent attacks would on occasion hit a person so hard that they took their own life.’

He lapsed into silence for a moment. The rain could still be heard.

‘Some of us were called cultural radicals, but we were all radical of course, whether our newspapers were privately owned or socialist. That didn’t dawn on me until later, though. But then, politics wasn’t something I took a major interest in. Besides, I mistrusted our politicians. Their qualifications often seemed inadequate to me, on both a human and an educational level.’

Inspector Jensen drummed his fingers lightly on the edge of the table.

‘I know, you’re waiting for me to get to the point,’ the other man said mournfully. ‘All right: one social phenomenon I mistrusted wholeheartedly and consistently was magazines. To my way of thinking, they had done nothing but harm for a long time. In fact, of course, they fulfilled their purpose, such as it was, and should be allowed to survive, but that certainly didn’t mean they should be left to live in peace. I devoted a lot of my time to scrutinising their so-called ideology, to dissecting it and tearing it to bits. I did that in a whole series of articles, and in a polemical book.’

He allowed himself a tight little smile.

‘That volume didn’t make me very popular among the sort of people who cherished that kind of magazine. They called me enemy number one of the weeklies, I recall. That was a long time ago.’

The man stopped and drew a few diagrammatic sketches on the sheet of paper. The pencil strokes were fine and prim. He seemed to have a very light touch.

‘Well then, let’s observe the constraints of time and make a long and complicated story short and simple. The structure of
society started to change, first slowly and imperceptibly, then at breakneck speed. The welfare state and the Accord were referred to increasingly often, until the two were seen as indissolubly linked and mutually dependent in every way. At first there was nothing to cause concern; the housing shortage was solved, crime figures went down; the youth question was being tackled. Meanwhile, the long-anticipated moral backlash started, as punctually as the Ice Age. Not especially worrying, as I say. Only a few of us had our suspicions. I assume you know as well as I do what happened next?’

Jensen did not answer. A strange new sensation was coming over him. It was a feeling of isolation, of seclusion, as if he and the little man with the glasses were under a plastic dome, or in a glass case in some museum.

‘The most worrying thing for us, of course, was that all publishing activity was being gathered into the same camp, that publisher after publisher and paper after paper were being sold to the same group of companies, always with financial profitability as the deciding factor. It was all going well, to the point where anyone who criticised anything was made to feel like the proverbial dog barking at the moon. Even people one might have considered far-sighted began to think it carping and petty to create dissent around issues on which there was really only one view. I was never with them on that one, though that may have had something to do with my obstinate, monomaniac streak. A tiny number of cultural workers, that was the term they used then, reacted the way I did.’

There was complete silence in the room. The sound from outside had stopped.

‘Even the paper I worked on was sucked in by the group, of course. I can’t remember exactly when it happened. I mean,
there was an apparently endless series of fusions and dummy buyouts, and not much was written or said about it. Even before that, my section had been cut right down. In the end it was scrapped altogether, dismissed as unnecessary. That meant in practice I had no way of earning a living, like a number of colleagues from other papers and various freelance writers. For some reason it was only the most stubborn and pugnacious of us who couldn’t be found new positions. I didn’t realise why until much later. Sorry, I must just get a drink. Do you want anything?’

Jensen shook his head. The man stood up and disappeared through a door that presumably led to the kitchen. He came back with a glass of mineral water, drank a few mouthfuls and set it down.

‘They’d never have made a sports reporter or TV reviewer of me, anyway,’ he muttered.

He lifted the glass a few centimetres, evidently to check it wasn’t leaving a ring on the tabletop.

‘A month or two went by, and the future didn’t look very bright in practical terms. Then one day I was invited in to the big publishing house to discuss possible employment, to my utter astonishment.’

He paused again. Jensen checked the time. 20.05. He hesitated for a moment and then said:

‘Do you admit to sending an anonymous and threatening letter to the management?’

‘No, no, not yet,’ the man said in irritation.

He took a drink of water.

‘I went there full of scepticism, and was confronted with the management of the time, which was in fact more or less the same as today’s. They were extremely accommodating, and
the proposal they made me took me totally unawares. I can still remember how they worded it.’

The man gave a laugh.

‘Not because I’ve a particularly good memory, but because I wrote it down. They said that free debate mustn’t be allowed to die, or its practitioners be left to sink into inactivity. That even with society well on its way to perfection, there would always be issues to be discussed. That free debate, even if it was superfluous, was one of the primary requirements for the ideal state. That existing culture, in whatever form, had to be nurtured and preserved for posterity. Finally they said that the group, having now assumed responsibility for such a large proportion of the country’s most vital publishing activity, was also prepared to take responsibility for the cultural debate. That they planned to publish the country’s first all-round, completely independent cultural magazine, with the aid of the best and most spirited people in the business.’

The man seemed to be getting more and more carried away by his subject. He tried to catch Jensen’s gaze and hold it.

‘They treated me very correctly. Dropped a few respectful insinuations about my frequently aired views on the weeklies, shook hands with me as if the whole thing were some kind of table tennis match, and said they were looking forward to confounding all my preconceptions. They rounded it all off with a concrete offer.’

He sat there for a while, apparently absorbed in his own thoughts.

‘Censorship,’ he said. ‘There’s no official censorship in our country, is there?’

Jensen shook his head.

‘Yet I can’t help feeling the censorship here is more
implacable and thorough than it can ever be in a police state. Why? Because it’s implemented privately, of course, in an entirely unregulated fashion, using methods that are legally unimpeachable. Because, mark my words, the practical possibility of censoring things, as distinct from the right to do it, lies with people – be they civil servants or individual businessmen – who are convinced their decisions are right, and to the benefit of all. And because most of the ordinary people also believe in this absurd doctrine and consequently censor themselves, whenever the need arises.’

He threw Jensen a quick glance, to check his audience was following.

‘Everything’s censored: the food we eat, the papers we read, the TV programmes we watch, the radio broadcasts we hear. Even the football matches are censored; they say they edit out any situations in which players are injured or infringe the rules in a major way. It’s all done for the good of the people. You could see the way it was all going from a very early stage.’

He drew a few more geometric figures on his piece of paper.

‘Those of us who were concerned with the debate on cultural issues noticed the tendency long ago, though it only showed itself at first in contexts that weren’t really in our area. The symptoms were most obvious in the judicial system. It started with the secrecy laws being applied more often and more rigorously; the military managed to persuade the legal profession and the politicians that all sorts of petty little things might compromise national security. Then we started to notice that other cases were also increasingly being heard behind closed doors, a practice I’ve always considered dubious and objectionable, even when the accused happens to be a sex maniac. In the end, almost every trifling case was being heard
wholly or partly out of reach of the individual members of the public. The motivation was always the same: to protect the individual from offensive, inflammatory or alarming facts that might have an impact on his or her peace of mind. At the same time it became clear – I still remember my amazement when I first discovered it – that a number of fairly high level state and local government officials had the authority to use the secrecy laws in connection with any enquiries pertaining to their own administrative bodies. Absurdly non-crucial matters, like where the local authority was to tip its rubbish and things like that, came under the Official Secrets Act and nobody turned a hair. And within the branches of business that were controlled by private capitalism, and newspaper publishing above all, censorship was deployed still more relentlessly. Usually not maliciously or to evil ends, but on the basis of something called moral responsibility.’