Murder on the Thirty-First Floor (3 page)

‘Evacuate,’ he said out of the corner of his mouth.

Jensen noted the time. 13.38.

The publisher stretched out a hand to the intercom and put his mouth close to the microphone. His voice was clear and distinct.

‘Fire drill. Implement high-speed evacuation. The building is to be empty within eighteen minutes, with the exception of the Special Department. Begin ninety seconds from now.’

The red light went out. The publisher stood up. He clarified:

‘It’s better for the people on the thirty-first floor to stay safely in their department than to be marching down the stairs. The power supply’s cut the moment the last lift reaches the ground floor.’

‘Who can wish us such harm?’ said the chairman sadly.

He went out.

The publisher started putting on his sandals.

Jensen left the room with the head of publishing.

As the door closed behind them, the corners of the director’s mouth fell, his expression grew stony and arrogant and his eyes sharp and searching. As they walked through the office the idle young women crouched over their desks.

It was exactly 13.40 as Inspector Jensen stepped out of the lift and emerged into the lobby. He gestured to his men to follow him and went out through the revolving doors.

The police left the building.

Behind them, voices from loudspeakers were echoing between the concrete walls.

The car was stationed right up against the wall of rock, halfway between the police roadblock and the car park.

Inspector Jensen sat in the front seat, next to the driver. He had a stopwatch in his left hand and the radio microphone in his right. He issued an almost constant series of gruff, terse messages to the policemen in the radio patrol cars and at the roadblocks. His posture was straight-backed, the grey hair at the back of his neck neat and close-cropped.

In the back seat sat the man with the silk tie and the variable smile. His forehead glistened with sweat and he shifted uneasily in his seat. Now, with neither superiors nor inferiors in the vicinity, his face was at rest. Its features were slack and apathetic, and a spongy, pink tongue occasionally flickered over his lips. He had presumably overlooked the fact that Jensen could see him in the rearview mirror.

‘There’s no need for you to stay here if you find it disagreeable, sir,’ said Jensen.

‘I’ve got to. The chairman and the publisher have both left. That leaves me in charge.’

‘I see.’

‘Is it dangerous?’

‘Scarcely.’

‘But if the whole building collapses?’

‘It seems unlikely.’

Jensen looked at the stopwatch: 13.51.

Then he looked back to the Skyscraper. Even from this distance, more than three hundred metres away, it looked awe-inspiring, overwhelming in its magnificent height and solidity. The white sunlight was reflected in four hundred and fifty panes of glass, set in identically uniform metal frames, and the blue facing of the walls looked cold, smooth and uncaring. It crossed his mind that the building really ought to collapse even without explosive charges, under its own enormous weight, or that the walls ought to explode from the sheer pressure compressed within them.

Out through the front entrance pushed an apparently endless column of people. It wound its way in a slow, wide loop between the rows of cars in the parking area, continued through the metal-barred gates in the tall wire-mesh fence, down the slope and diagonally over the grey concrete apron of the lorry depot. At the far side of the loading platforms and long, squat rows of warehouses it broke apart and dispersed into a diffuse grey mass, a fog bank of people. Despite the distance, Jensen could see that about two-thirds of the employees appeared to be women and that most of them were wearing green. Presumably it was this spring’s colour.

Two large red trucks equipped with hose reels and turntable ladders drove on to the forecourt and pulled up a short distance from the entrance doors. The firefighters sat in rows along the sides and their steel helmets glinted in the sun. Not a sound had been heard from their sirens or alarm bells.

By 13.57 the stream of people was thinning out, and a minute after that, only a few stray individuals were emerging through the glass doors.

A few moments later, just a single figure, a man, was to be
seen at the entrance. Straining his eyes, Jensen recognised him. It was the head of the plainclothes patrol.

Jensen looked at the stopwatch. 13.59.

Behind him he could hear the nervous movements of the director of publishing.

The firefighters remained in their seats. The solitary policeman had vanished. The building was empty.

Jensen took a final glance at the stopwatch. Then he stared at the Skyscraper and started the countdown.

Past fifteen, the seconds seemed to stretch and get longer.

Fourteen … thirteen … twelve … eleven … ten … nine … eight … seven … six … five … four … three … two … one …

‘Zero,’ said Inspector Jensen.

‘This is an unprecedented crime,’ said the chief of police over the telephone.

‘But there was no bomb. Nothing happened, nothing at all. After an hour the fire drill was called off and the staff went back to work. By four o’clock or earlier, everything was back to normal again.’

‘None the less, it is an unprecedented crime,’ said the chief of police.

His voice was insistent, with a hint of entreaty, as if he was trying to convince not only the person he was addressing but also himself.

‘The perpetrator must be caught,’ he said.

‘The investigation will naturally continue.’

‘This can’t be any old routine investigation. You’ve got to find the culprit.’

‘Yes.’

‘Now listen here a moment. I don’t want to criticise the steps you took, of course.’

‘I did the only thing possible. The risk was too great. It could have meant the loss of hundreds of lives, maybe even more. If fire had broken out in the building as a result of an explosion there wasn’t much we could have done. The fire brigade’s ladders only reach the seventh or eighth floor. The firefighters would have had to attack it from below and the fire would have carried on
spreading upwards. What’s more, the building’s a hundred and twenty metres tall and at heights above thirty metres the jumping nets are useless.’

‘Of course, I understand all that. And I’m not criticising you, as I said. But they’re very upset. The shutdown allegedly cost them nearly two million. The chairman’s been in personal touch with the Minister for the Interior. He didn’t exactly lodge a complaint.’

Pause.

‘Thank God, no official complaint.’

Jensen said nothing.

‘But he was very upset, as I say. By both the financial cost and the chicanery they’ve been exposed to. That was his precise word: chicanery.’

‘Yes.’

‘They demand that the perpetrator be apprehended at once.’

‘It may take time. The letter’s our only lead.’

‘I know that. But this matter’s got to be cleared up.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a very sensitive investigation, and not only that but also, as I say, extremely urgent. I want you to clear your desk of everything else right away. Whatever else you’re busy with can be considered non-essential.’

‘Understood.’

‘Today’s Monday. You’ve got a week, no more. Seven days, Jensen.’

‘Understood.’

‘I’m putting you in personal charge of this. Naturally you’ll get all the technical support staff you need, but don’t give them any details about the case. If you need to confer with anyone, come straight to me.’

‘I dare say the plainclothes patrol already has a fair idea what’s been going on.’

‘Yes, that’s very unfortunate. You must insist on their complete discretion.’

‘Of course.’

‘You must conduct any essential interviews yourself.’

‘Understood.’

‘One other thing: they don’t want to be disturbed by the investigation while it’s in progress. Their time is at a premium. If you consider it absolutely vital to ask them for information, they prefer to communicate it to you through their chief executive, the director of publishing.’

‘Understood.’

‘Have you met him?’

‘Yes.’

‘Jensen?’

‘Yes?’

‘You’ve got to pull this off. Not least for your own sake.’

Inspector Jensen hung up. He rested his elbows on his green blotter and put his head in his hands. His short grey hair was rough and bristly to the touch of his fingertips. He had been on duty now for fifteen hours, it was 10 p.m. and he was very tired.

He got up from his desk chair, stretched his back and shoulders, and went out into the corridor and down the spiral staircase to the reception area and duty desk. Everything down there was old-fashioned and the walls were painted the same grass-green colour he remembered from his own time as a patrol officer twenty-five years before. A long wooden counter ran the length of the room, and beyond it were some wall-mounted benches and a row of interrogation booths with glass
screens and smooth, round doorknobs. At this time of day there were few people in the guardroom. A few escaped alcoholics and starving prostitutes, all middle-aged or older, sat huddled on the benches waiting for their turn in the booths, and behind the desk sat a bare-headed police officer in a green linen uniform. He was the one on telephone duty. Every so often there was the sound of a vehicle rumbling in through the archway.

Jensen opened a steel door in the wall and went down to the basement. The Sixteenth District station was an old one, virtually the only old building still standing in this part of the city, and in a pretty poor state of repair, but the arrest cells were newly built. The ceilings, floors and walls were painted white and the barred doors gleamed, etched in the bright lights.

Outside the door to the yard stood a grey police van with the back doors open. Some uniformed constables were emptying it of its passengers, shoving a collection of drunks into the building for a full body search. They were dealing very roughly with their charges, but Jensen knew it was more out of exhaustion than brutality.

He passed through the search area and looked into the drunks’ naked, desperate faces.

Despite the strict clampdown, public drunkenness was rising from year to year, and since the government had forced through a new law making alcohol abuse an offence in the home as well, the burden of police work had assumed almost superhuman proportions. Every evening between two and three thousand individuals were arrested, all more or less blind drunk; around half of them were women. Jensen recalled that back in his time as a patrol officer, they had thought three hundred drunks on a Saturday night was a lot.

An ambulance had pulled up alongside the van, and behind it stood a young man in a cap and a white coat. It was the police doctor.

‘Five of them need to go to hospital and get their stomachs pumped,’ he said. ‘I daren’t keep them here. I can’t be held responsible if anything should happen to them.’

Jensen nodded.

‘What a bloody mess it all is,’ said the police doctor. ‘They slap five thousand per cent duty on booze. Then they create living conditions that force people to drink themselves to death, and to crown it all they earn three hundred thousand a day in fines for drunkenness, in this city alone.’

‘You need to watch your tongue,’ said Inspector Jensen.

Inspector Jensen lived relatively centrally, in a housing area south of the city, and it took him less than an hour to drive home in his police car.

In the city centre the streets were quite busy; the snack bars and cinemas were still open and the pavements were full of people strolling past the rows of lighted shop windows. The people’s faces looked white and tense, as though pained by the cold, corrosive light of the street lamps and advertising signs. There were occasional groups of young people gathered idly around popcorn stalls or in front of shop windows. Most were just standing there and did not seem to be talking to each other. Some of them cast indifferent glances at the police car.

Youth crime, previously considered a serious problem, had decreased in the last ten years and had now been almost eradicated. There was less crime generally, in all categories; it was really only alcohol abuse that was on the rise. At several places in the shopping area, Jensen saw uniformed officers at work. Their white rubber truncheons glinted in the neon light as they pushed those they had arrested into the police vans.

He drove down into the road tunnel by the Ministry of the Interior and came back up eight kilometres later in an industrial area empty of people, crossed a bridge and continued south down the motorway.

He felt tired and had a dull, nagging pain in his diaphragm, on the right-hand side.

The suburb where he lived comprised thirty-six eight-storey tower blocks, set out in four parallel lines. Between the rows of apartment blocks there were car parks, areas of grass, and play pavilions of transparent plastic for the children.

Jensen pulled up in front of the seventh block in the third row, turned off the ignition and got out into the cold, clear, starry night. Although his watch showed it was only five past eleven, all the blocks were in darkness. He put a coin in the parking meter, turned the knob to set the red hour hand, and went up to his flat.

He switched on the light and took off his outdoor clothes, shoes, tie and jacket. He unbuttoned his shirt and walked through from the hall, letting his eyes rest briefly on the impersonal furnishings, the large television set and the police training college photos hanging on the walls.

Then he let down the blinds at the windows, took off his trousers and switched off the light. He went out into the kitchen and took the bottle from the refrigerator.

Inspector Jensen went to get a tumbler, turned down the bedcover and top sheet and sat on the bed.

He sat in the darkness and drank.

As the pain in his diaphragm loosened its grip, he put his glass on the bedside table and lay down.

He fell asleep almost instantly.

Inspector Jensen woke up at half past six in the morning. He got out of bed and went to the bathroom, washed his hands and face and the back of his neck in cold water, shaved and cleaned his teeth. Once he had finished gargling, he coughed for a long time.