Murder on the Thirty-First Floor (7 page)

Some parts of the picture were white: the top of the panels, and the oval shapes emerging from the gleaming teeth of the characters. In these spaces there were short, easy-to-read captions, done in capital letters in felt pen, but still not complete.

He recognised the characters from one of the publications he had been studying the previous evening.

Pinned to the wall above the desk was a photocopied notice. He read:

Inspector Jensen took one last look at the illustrations, switched off the light and pulled the self-locking door closed behind him.

He took the lift down eight floors and was then in the offices of one of the bigger magazines. He could now clearly hear, at regular intervals, the faint sounds made by the person who was following. So that was settled, and he didn’t need to worry about it any longer.

He opened a couple of doors and went into concrete cells identical to those he had seen on the thirteenth floor. On the desks were pictures of royalty, film and pop stars, children, dogs and cats, along with articles that were obviously in the process of being translated or edited in some way. Some of them had been corrected in red ink.

He read through a few of them and found that the deletions were almost exclusively modestly critical observations or value
judgements of varying kinds. The articles were about popular artistes abroad.

The editor in chief’s office was larger than the rest. It had a pale beige carpet and the chairs had white PVC seat covers. On the desk, besides a loudspeaker unit, there were two white telephones, a pale grey blotter and a photograph in a steel frame. The photo was obviously of the editor in chief himself, a thin, middle-aged man with a worried expression, a doglike gaze and a well-trimmed moustache.

Inspector Jensen sat down in the chair behind the desk. When he cleared his throat, the sound echoed around the room, which seemed cold and desolate and bigger than it really was. There were no books or magazines in there, but on the white wall opposite the desk there was a big, framed picture in full colour. It was a photograph of the Skyscraper after dark, its façade illuminated by floodlights.

He opened some of the drawers but did not find anything of interest. In one of them there was a brown envelope, sealed with sticky tape and marked
PRIVATE
. It contained some colour photographs and a printed slip bearing the words:
This is an exclusive offer at a special reduced price from the Publishing House’s international picture service, reserved for top managerial positions
. They were pictures of naked women with large, pink breasts and shaved genital areas.

Inspector Jensen carefully resealed the envelope and put it back in its place. There was no legal ban on images of that kind, but after a huge upswing in popularity a few years before, works of pornography had for some reason almost disappeared off the market. In some quarters, the slump in demand was being linked to the rapid decline in the birth rate.

He lifted the blotter and found an internal memo from the head of publishing. It read:

A note in the margin indicated that the memo had been sent to all top section heads.

As Inspector Jensen re-emerged into the corridor, he thought he heard a slight rustling sound behind one of the closed doors.

He got out the master key, opened the door and went in. The lights were off, but in the faint reflection of the floodlighting he saw a man slumped in a desk chair. He closed the door and switched on the light. The room was of the standard type, with concrete walls and chrome window frames. The air was heavy and suffocating, thick with the smell of alcohol, tobacco smoke and vomit.

The man in the chair appeared to be in his fifties. He was heavily built and on the plump side, and was wearing a jacket,
a white shirt, a tie, shoes and socks. His trousers were spread out on the desk, where he had clearly been trying to wipe them clean; his underpants were hanging on the radiator. His chin was resting on his chest and his face was pink. On the desk stood a paper cup and an almost empty bottle of spirits, and there was an aluminium wastepaper bin between his feet.

The man grimaced at the bright, white light and stared with bloodshot eyes.

‘Journalism’s dead,’ he said. ‘I’m dead. Everything’s dead.’

He groped for the bottle on the desk.

‘Here I sit in this bloody soup kitchen. Hounded and ordered about by people who can’t even read or write. Me! Year after year.’

He had hold of the bottle now, and poured himself the final drop.

‘The biggest soup kitchen in the world,’ he said. ‘Three hundred and fifty portions a week. A soup made of nothing but lies, guaranteed tasteless. Year after year.’

His whole body was shaking and he needed both hands to raise the cup to his lips.

‘But now it’s over,’ he said.

He picked up a letter from the desk and waved it.

‘Read this,’ he said. ‘Behold the finale.’

Inspector Jensen took the piece of paper. It was a communication from the editor in chief:

‘He’d read the whole thing before it went for typesetting, of course. That bloody reader’s letter as well. But I’m saying nothing. The poor fucker’s fighting to save his own skin.’

The man regarded Jensen with fresh interest.

‘Who are you? A new director? You’ll be very happy here, my lad. We’ve got dressed-up farmhands from dunghills in the sticks as editors in chief here. And the odd village whore, of course, that somebody happens to have made a fool of himself with.’

Jensen took out his blue card. The man in the chair didn’t even glance at it. He said:

‘I’ve been a journalist for thirty years. I’ve seen the whole process of spiritual decay. The intellectual strangulation. The world’s slowest garrotte. Once upon a time, I had a will. That was wrong. I still have a bit of will, just a tiny little scrap. That’s wrong, too. I can write. That’s wrong. That’s why they hate me. But for now, they need people like me. Until someone invents a machine that can write their bloody crap. They loathe me because I’m not an infallible machine with handles and dials that writes their crappy lies, six pages an hour, without typos or crossings-out or personal reflections. Now I’m drunk. Three cheers for that.’

His eyes were open wide and the pupils were mere dots.

‘And that poor devil just hangs there like a bit of cooked macaroni,’ he said.

He waved a vague hand in the direction of his penis, slumped still further and muttered:

‘As soon as my trousers are dry I shall try to get myself home.’

The man sat there in silence for a while. He was breathless, his breathing uneven. He threw out his right arm and said:

‘Esteemed audience! Our play is now ended and the hero will be hanged, for the human race never changes or does anything as a favour or for free. Do you know who wrote that?’

‘No,’ said Inspector Jensen.

He switched off the light and left the room.

On the tenth floor he transferred to the paternoster lift and took it all the way down to the paper store.

The night-time lighting was in operation, individual blue globes that shed a faint, uncertain gleam.

He stood entirely still and felt the pressure of the vast building towering above him. The rotary presses and machines had all stopped and the weight and massive solidity of the Skyscraper seemed to grow in time with the silence. He could no longer hear the sound of whoever was shadowing him.

He took the lift back up to street level. The lobby was empty and he waited. It took three minutes for the man in the grey suit to emerge from a side door and walk over to the security desk.

‘There’s an inebriated person in room two thousand, one hundred and forty-three,’ said Inspector Jensen.

‘He’s being dealt with,’ said the man in grey tonelessly.

Inspector Jensen opened the front entrance with his own key and stepped out into the cold night air.

By the time he got back to the station in the Sixteenth District it was five to ten. His room offered nothing to detain him, and he went downstairs to the arrest area, where two young women were just being admitted through the entrance from the yard. He waited while they handed over their ID cards, shoes, outdoor clothes and handbags at the admittance desk. One of them swore and spat in the registering officer’s face. The constable who had made the arrest yawned and twisted her wrist as he glanced wearily at his watch. The other woman under arrest just stood there, head down and arms hanging. She could not stop crying, and words came snuffling indistinctly through her tears. They were the usual ones, ‘No, no,’ and ‘I don’t want to.’

The women were bundled off by a couple of police nurses in rubber gloves and pale green plastic coats, and almost immediately there was the sound of sobbing and cries of distress as they were body-searched. The female staff were more efficient and more persistent than their male counterparts.

He went over to the admittance desk and read through the list of people booked in over the previous few hours. There had been no police intervention at the publishing house, and no reports had come from there, either.

Inspector Jensen didn’t eat anything on the way home. He
wasn’t particularly hungry, and the hollow feeling in his stomach had faded. But despite the warmth and safety of the car, he was shivering as if he were cold, and found it hard to keep his hands still on the steering wheel.

That was the third day gone. He had four left.

It was a cold, clear morning. There was a thin layer of fresh snow on the grass areas between the apartment blocks, and the concrete surface of the motorway had a veil of black ice.

Inspector Jensen had woken early, and despite the traffic congestion and slippery road conditions he reached his office in good time. His throat was dry, and although he had gargled and brushed his teeth, the unpleasant stale taste persisted. He sent for a bottle of mineral water from the canteen and started going through the papers on his desk. The forensics institute report hadn’t arrived, and the others appeared of no interest. The man at the post office was getting nowhere. Jensen read his short account thoroughly, massaged his temples and rang the number of the main post office. It took a long time for the policeman to come to the phone.

‘Jensen here.’

‘Yes, Inspector.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Interviewing the sorters. It’s going to take quite a while.’

‘Be more precise.’

‘Two more days. Maybe even three.’

‘Do you think it’s going to give you any leads?’

‘No, not really. There are lots of letters with addresses made out of bits cut from newspaper headlines. I’ve seen over a
hundred already. Most of them aren’t even anonymous. It’s just something people do.’

‘Why?’

‘Some sort of joke, I suppose. The only employee who can remember this particular letter is the express messenger who delivered it.’

‘Have you got a copy of the letter itself?’

‘No, Inspector. But I’ve got one of the envelopes and the address.’

‘I know that. Avoid giving me unnecessary information.’

‘Yes, Inspector.’

‘Stop what you’re doing. Go to the forensics lab, have a photocopy made of the text and find out which newspapers or magazines the letters came from. Understood?’

‘Understood.’

Inspector Jensen replaced the receiver. Outside the window, the sanitary squad was clattering around with its shovels and metal dustpans.

He clasped his hands and waited.

When he’d been waiting for three hours and twenty minutes, the telephone rang.

‘We’ve identified the paper used for the letter,’ said the lab assistant.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s document-grade paper of a weight known as CB–3. It’s manufactured by one of the group’s own paper mills.’

The line went quiet for a moment. Then the man went on:

‘Not that surprising in itself. They own practically the whole paper-making industry.’

‘Get to the point,’ said Inspector Jensen.

‘This mill is north of here, only forty kilometres from the
city. We’ve got a man up there. I spoke to him five minutes ago.’

‘And?’

‘This kind has been in production for about a year. It’s mainly intended for export, but some smallish consignments have gone to a so-called job-printing firm, which also belongs to the group. They’ve taken delivery of two different sizes. From what I can understand, it’s only the larger format that’s relevant here. We won’t be taking this any further now. The rest is up to your lot. I’ve got someone coming over with all the names and addresses. They should be with you in ten minutes.’