Murder on the Thirty-First Floor (6 page)

‘I said that’ll do,’ the head of publishing said sharply. ‘So you can go now.’

He scrawled a signature, handed the pass and key to his visitor and said:

‘The key will admit you to all areas of potential interest. Well, not to the management’s private offices, of course, nor to this one.’

‘Thank you.’

‘Have you any other questions? If not, then …’

He glanced apologetically at his watch.

‘Just one detail,’ said Inspector Jensen. ‘What’s the Special Department?’

‘A project group that works on the planning of new magazines.’

Inspector Jensen nodded, put the key and the blue pass in his breast pocket and left the room.

Before starting his car, he took out the crumpled sheet of paper, smoothed it out and tried the feel of it between his fingers. It seemed to be of very good quality and the size looked rather unusual.

The head of publishing’s handwriting was as spiky and uneven as a child’s, but not particularly hard to decipher. Jensen read:

He folded up the sheet of paper and put it in the glove compartment on top of his service pistol. Then he leaned his head against the side window and looked at the Skyscraper; his gaze was unperturbed and gave nothing away.

He had a hollow feeling in his stomach. He was hungry, but knew the pain would start as soon as he ate anything.

Inspector Jensen turned the ignition key and looked at his watch.

It was half past twelve, and already Wednesday.

‘No,’ said the lab technician, ‘it’s not the same paper. Nor the same size. But …’

‘But?’

‘There’s very little difference in the quality. The structure’s similar. It’s rather unique, in fact.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning it could well be that both papers were made at the same factory.’

‘I see.’

‘We’re just following that up. It’s a distinct possibility, at any rate.’

The man seemed to be hesitating. After a moment he said:

‘Is whoever wrote the sentences on this piece of paper linked to the case in any way?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘A man who was here from the Institute for Forensic Psychiatry took a look at them. He concluded that the person who wrote these sentences suffers from dyslexia. He was pretty certain about it.’

‘Who allowed this psychiatrist to see case material?’

‘I did. He’s an acquaintance of mine. He happened to be here for something else.’

‘I shall be reporting you for professional misconduct.’

Inspector Jensen hung up.

‘Pretty certain,’ he said to himself.

‘Rather unique,’ he said.

He went out to the toilets for a paper cup of water, put in three teaspoons of bicarbonate of soda, stirred it with his pen and drank.

He fished out the key. It was long and flat, and the complicated key-bit was a strange shape. He weighed the key in his hand and took a quick glance at the clock.

It was twenty past three, and still Wednesday.

From the lobby of the Skyscraper, Inspector Jensen turned left and took the paternoster lift down. The stack of lift compartments sank slowly and creakily, and he kept an observant eye out to see what was on each floor as he passed it. First came a vast space in which electric trucks moved along narrow corridors between walls of brand-new, bundled magazines; then men in overalls pushing curved moulds on trolleys and the deafening racket of the rotary presses. Another floor down he saw shower rooms, toilets and changing rooms with benches and rows of green metal lockers. On the benches sat people who seemed to be on their break or had finished their shift. Most of them were leafing apathetically through colourful magazines that had presumably just come off the presses. Then his ride was at an end; he got out and was in the paper warehouse. It was quiet down there, but not entirely silent, because the collected sounds of the immense building above penetrated down as a powerful, pulsating roar. He wandered around randomly for a while in the gloom, between rows of bales and rolls of paper standing on end. The only person he saw was a pale little man in a white warehouseman’s coat, who stared at him in alarm and crushed a burning cigarette in his closed hand.

Inspector Jensen left the paper store and took the lift back up. At street level he was joined by a middle-aged man in a grey suit. The man stepped into the same compartment and
went with him up to the tenth floor, where they had to change. He said nothing, and did not once look at his fellow passenger. In the paternoster lift from the tenth floor, Jensen just had time to see the man in grey getting into the compartment below his own.

On the twentieth floor he changed to a third paternoster lift, and four minutes later he was at the top.

He found himself in a narrow, windowless concrete corridor, which was uncarpeted. It ran in a rectangle round a core of staircases and lift systems, and around its outer sides there were white-painted doors. To the left of each door was a little plate with one, two, three or four names. The corridor was flooded with cold, blue-white light from the banks of skylights in the roof.

It was clear from the metal plates that these were the editorial offices of the comic section. He went down five flights of stairs and was still in the same section. There were very few people to be seen in the corridors, but he heard voices and the clatter of typewriters through the doors. On every floor there were noticeboards, mainly used for notices from the management to the staff. There were also time clocks, clocking in machines for the nightwatchmen and, on the ceiling, an automatic sprinkler system in case of fire.

On the twenty-fourth floor there was a total of four editorial offices. He recognised the names of the magazines and recalled that they were all of simple, basic design, their content consisting mainly of stories with gaudy illustrations.

Inspector Jensen slowly worked his way down. On every floor he did a circuit of the four corridors, two longer and two shorter, joined into a rectangle. Here, too, the doors were white and the walls bare. Apart from the names on the doors, the
top seven floors were all identical. Everything was very neat and tidy; there were no signs of carelessness or neglect and the cleaning service seemed immaculate. From behind the doors, voices and ringing telephones could be heard, with the sound of a typewriter here and there.

He stopped by one of the noticeboards and read:

There were further exhortations, all with similar content and expressed in a similar way. Most of them were signed by the company management or those responsible for the building,
a few of them by the publisher himself. Inspector Jensen read them all, then continued working his way down.

The next floors he came to were evidently where the bigger, more elegant magazines were produced. They were decorated rather differently, with pale carpets in the corridors, steel chairs and chrome ashtrays. The closer he got to the eighteenth floor, the greater the cool elegance grew, only to fade away again further down. The directorate occupied four floors; below that there were offices for general administration, advertising, distribution and much more. The corridors grew bare again and the clatter of typewriters intensified. The light was cold, white and searing.

Inspector Jensen toured floor after floor. When he got down to the vast lobby, it was almost five. He had used the stairs the whole way down and felt a vague weariness in his calves and at the backs of his knees.

Approximately two minutes later, the man in grey came down the stairs. Inspector Jensen hadn’t seen him since they parted by the paternoster lift on the tenth floor an hour earlier. The man went into the security desk at the front entrance. He could be seen saying something to the men in uniform behind the wall of glass. Then he wiped the sweat from his brow and cast a fleeting, indifferent glance round the lobby.

The clock in the big hall struck five and exactly one minute later, the automatic doors of the first fully loaded high-speed elevator opened.

The steady stream of people continued for more than half an hour before it began to thin out. Inspector Jensen, his hands clasped behind his back, stood rocking gently to and fro on the balls of his feet as he watched the people hurry past. On the far side of the revolving doors they dispersed and disappeared, timid and hunched, in the direction of their cars.

By a quarter to six, the lobby was empty. The lifts stood still. The men in the white uniforms locked the front entrance and left. Only the man in grey was left there behind the wall of glass. It was almost dark outside.

Inspector Jensen stepped into one of the aluminium-lined lifts and pressed the top button on the control panel. The lift came to a swift, stomach-lurching stop at the eighteenth floor, the doors opened and closed, and then it continued upwards.

The corridors of the comic department were still as brightly lit, but the sounds behind the doors had stopped. He stood still, listening, and after about thirty seconds he heard a lift stop somewhere nearby, presumably one floor below. He waited a bit longer but could not hear any footsteps. There was nothing to be heard at all, and yet the silence was not complete. Only when he leaned sideways and pressed his ear to the concrete wall could he make out the roar and throb of distant machine halls. When he had listened long enough, the sound became more tangible, acute and insistent like an unidentified sensation of pain.

He straightened up and walked the corridors. He was constantly aware of the sound. At the top of the last flight of stairs there were two steel doors with white enamel paint, one of them rather taller and wider than the other. Neither had a handle. He got out the key with the strangely shaped key-bit and tried it first in the smaller door, but could not get it to fit. The second door, on the other hand, opened at once and he saw a steep, narrow flight of concrete steps, sparsely lit by small white globe-shaped lights.

Inspector Jensen went up the steps, opened another door and emerged on to the roof.

It was now completely dark, and the evening wind was chill
and biting. Round the flat roof ran a brick-built parapet about a metre tall. Far below lay the town, with millions and millions of cold, white pinpricks of light. Some ten squat chimneys stuck up from the middle of the roof. Smoke was issuing from a couple of them, and despite the stiff wind he could smell the acrid, choking fumes.

He opened the door at the top of the steps and thought he heard someone shut the one at the bottom, but when he got down there, the thirtieth floor was empty, silent and deserted. He tried the master key in the lock of the smaller door one more time but still could not open it. Presumably the door led to some technical installation such as the lift machinery or the central electrical unit.

He made another circuit of the closed corridor system again, walking quietly and cautiously on his rubber soles from sheer force of habit. On the far side he stopped and listened, and again thought he could make out the sound of footsteps somewhere nearby. The sound ceased at once and might just have been an echo.

He took out the master key again, opened a door and went into one of the editorial offices. It was considerably larger than the arrest cells in the basement of the Sixteenth District police station; the concrete walls were bare and white, as was the ceiling, and the floor was pale grey. The furniture consisted of three white-painted desks, covering almost the entire floor area, and on the windowsill stood an intercom. On the desks were sheets of paper, drawings, rulers and felt pens, all tidily laid out.

Inspector Jensen paused by one of them and looked at a brightly coloured drawing, divided into four panels and clearly a comic strip. Beside the illustration lay a sheet of paper with
some typed text and the heading: ‘Original script from the authorial department.’

The first picture was of a restaurant scene. A blonde woman with huge breasts was sitting at a table opposite a man who had a blue mask over his eyes and was wearing a catsuit with a wide leather belt. In the middle of his chest he had a skull motif. In the background there were a dance band and people in dinner jackets and long dresses, and on the table stood a champagne bottle and two glasses. In the next picture, the man with the peculiar costume was alone; he had a glowing halo round his head and his hand was stuck in something that looked a bit like a primus stove. The next panel showed the restaurant again; the man in the catsuit seemed to be hanging in mid-air above the table, while the blonde woman looked at him expressionlessly. The last illustration was of the man in the catsuit; he was still hanging there, and the stars were visible in the background. From a ring on his right index finger sprouted a giant-sized hand on a long stalk. In the hand lay an orange.