Sohlberg and the Missing Schoolboy: an Inspector Sohlberg mystery (Inspector Sohlberg Mysteries) (5 page)

She turned and looked at him. “It must be strange if not difficult to have so many reminders of the past . . . beginning with this house.”

“Yes,” he said. “A remembrance of things past. This house brings back my childhood . . . and so many memories . . . even those as a young adult.”

During the past two days he had been embarrassed when she had caught him lost in memories while he stared wistfully at different rooms of his old childhood home. He felt foolish at his sentimental longing for the good old days of his youth. And yet he yearned for the happy and carefree life that he had enjoyed at the lovely waterfront home of glass-and-cedar thanks to his generous and loving parents.

Emma Sohlberg read his face and said, “Well . . . you can’t be blamed for feeling nostalgic over the great childhood you had here with your parents.”

“True,” said Sohlberg, “but it’s all in the past.”

She dried her hands on the towel that he held. She pulled him closer with the towel and kissed him gently on the lips. “Please take a nap if you can.”

Sohlberg smiled and watched her walk down the hallway and up the stairs. He drank the last of the sparkling mineral water of the third Farris bottle that he had consumed after returning from his early morning run. He sauntered outside and headed past the towering pines down to the beach where his father had built a small guest cabin.

His father had built the cabin and used it as an office after his refurbished industrial machinery business took off in the early 1980s. Of course the cabin and the sailboat and the floating dock and other luxuries came only after many years of struggling and economizing. Sohlberg remembered many cold winters with little heat in the house and simple paper shades for curtains. Norway’s oil boom greatly prospered his father’s business in the 1980s and Sohlberg sometimes wondered if he should have gone into business with his father.

“Me the businessman,” Sohlberg said to himself as he sat down before his father’s desk.

The desk faced a panoramic wall-to-wall window that extended from the floor all the way up to the ceiling. The sun-drenched Oslofjord’s blue waters beckoned.

So . . . here I am . . . back home.

Intense melancholy overcame Sohlberg. He longed to live in his homeland. And yet he was doomed to permanent exile outside of Norway in an obscure paper-pushing bureaucratic job at Interpol. Sohlberg desired one thing above all: to investigate homicides and major crimes. But his “adviser” position at Interpol meant that he would never investigate any crime unless a local law enforcement agency authorized him to do so.

Satan has a better chance of working in Heaven.

Sohlberg’s fancy title and decent salary as a Senior Adviser to the Secretary General of Interpol was no substitute for his ruined career as a homicide detective in Norway.

I got punished for doing my job. . . .

No way I was going to back down from arresting those two bribe-taking Supreme Court Justices.

Maybe I did go over the top when I dragged them out in handcuffs through the court’s main doors on Høyesteretts plass . . . in front of so many newspaper and television reporters.

He watched a faraway sailboat skim the water so gracefully that it appeared to be floating in the air.

Time to do chores.

In less than an hour Sohlberg had carefully organized and added up the receipts and invoices that he needed to present to Interpol as soon as possible. He wanted to quickly get reimbursed for more than $ 12,932 U.S. dollars that he had spent on airlines and taxis and hotels and meals on his recent round of traveling to Norway from the USA. He decided that he would send the reimbursement request by fax later that night to Lyon in France. But he had to make absolutely sure that he added and included every item correctly because he knew better than to submit a wrong reimbursement request to the accountants and bookkeepers at Interpol. The bean counters always made him and other Interpol advisers and field agents feel that they were somehow defrauding Interpol even when submitting the most accurate of expense reports.

Sohlberg had as ususal organized all the paperwork for the expense report on a day-by-day basis from the day that he and Fru Sohlberg had flown out of Seattle in the United States to the day that they arrived in Copenhagen Denmark for a four-day meeting of Interpol’s National Central Bureau (NCB) for the European Region. He still needed to add the paperwork for the airfare from Copenhagen to Oslo and the car rental at the airport.

Representatives from all 49 member nations of the Regional European NCB had attended the Copenhagen meeting to review and discuss links between major organized crime groups that smuggled drugs and humans from Asia into the western shores of Canada and the United States.

Sohlberg spoke at the Copenhagen meeting in his official capacity as a full-time Interpol Adviser. During the past two years he had worked out of Seattle in the USA and directed a secret 12-country investigation into the smuggling of pure grade Number 4 heroin by criminal gangs from Russia and Canada and the USA.

He placed the Interpol forms for reimbursement on the desk and was focusing on not making any errors when his cell phone buzzed angrily. Sohlberg frowned when he saw the incoming phone number on the little screen.

“Hei,” he said trying to sound as relaxed and casual as possible given the caller’s identity.

“Are you free to talk?”

“Yes.”

“Are you still on schedule to give a talk three days from now on heroin smuggling to all twenty-seven of our districts?”

“I am. Why do you ask?”

“We need to meet. Come by my office after you finish your talk.”

The call from the Commissioner for the Oslo Police Regional District enraged Sohlberg. He hated Ivar Thorsen. Technically the man was still his boss and that made Sohlberg hate him even more. On days like this Sohlberg felt that he would explode and have a heart attack or a stroke over the cruel fact that he was still subject to taking orders from an incompetent fool like Ivar Thorsen.

To think that they had once been close friends all the way from kindergarten to high school!

Even as Sohlberg thought about their lost friendship from so long ago he remembered that he and other classmates could barely tolerate Ivar Thorsen after a couple of hours. Few could tolerate the man’s hypocritical fawning. Thorsen’s endless bootlicking disgusted all but the dumbest persons as grotesque and obvious attempts to ingratiate himself into a subservient but beneficial relationship. In other words Ivar Thorsen had inherited all of his mother’s pushy and cunning social designs and schemes but none of her charms which included the ample bosom and other intimate delicacies that she first shared with her employer’s son and then with the employer himself.

“Why?” shouted Sohlberg. “Why do we need to meet? What’s this about?”

“I’ll see you at noon sharp.”

Sohlberg immediately hanged up without waiting to hear more. “What a piece of garbage that Thorsen! Just what does he want from me?”

His former friend Ivar Thorsen was now
the
enemy and 100% responsible in Sohlberg’s mind for pushing him out of Norway and into Lyon in France for a job at Interpol. According to the press release at the time:

“The National Police Commissioner of the National Police Directorate is pleased to announce that the Commissioner is, effective immediately, assigning and loaning
Police Chief Inspector Harald Sohlberg of the Oslo Police Regional District to Interpol at the request of the General Secretary of Interpol.

“Herr Sohlberg will serve as a senior Interpol Adviser for an indefinite period of time on critical international law enforcement matters that directly affect Norway and Europe. Furthermore, pursuant to long-standing arrangements with Interpol, Herr Sohlberg will continue in his capacity as a Police Chief Inspector for the Oslo Police Regional District and continue reporting to Commissioner Ivar Thorsen of the Oslo Police Regional District.”

Of course the government’s official press release failed to disclose that Thorsen moved Sohlberg to Interpol after Sohlberg exposed scandalous judicial corruption in Norway’s Supreme Court. The humiliating exile still rankled Sohlberg even though it had taken place 15 years ago on the very day that Sohlberg was celebrating his fifth year as a highly respected Chief Inspector.

Sohlberg cursed. He left his father’s cabin to take a long walk on Ulvøya Island before he got angry enough to punch a hole through his father’s desk.

~ ~ ~

A few miles away another man was about to receive another troubling communication. The man turned on the laptop computer and waited. He was in for a long long night and it was not just because of the midsummer Sankthansaften celebrations. He did not look forward to the midnight sun which would serve as a constant reminder that his personal life was one of extremes. Oslo provided 18 hours of daylight in the summer and 6 hours of daylight in the winter and those unbalanced extremes were no different than those in his heart and soul. He felt that he was losing his grip on reality.

The spy software SILENT KEYLOGGER finally loaded and asked him for his password.

You are?

He typed in *******.

The man felt sick when he read the latest entries that the key logging software had picked up from the desktop computer in the small bedroom down the hallway. Waves of nausea rolled over him. And yet he was grateful for the keyboard monitoring software that he had bought at a computer store and covertly installed into a laptop at his home. The software accurately and secretly recorded every single keyboard stroke that anyone made on the computer that he wanted to spy on.

What does a man do when he is betrayed on every single possible level of a relationship?

The question disturbed him more than the answer or answers. The question inevitably raised the question of how he had allowed himself to be trapped in such a sick and false relationship. Twisted and putrid would not begin to describe the mess he had gotten himself into so stupidly and recklessly. The worst part of his troubles was that he still could not believe that someone as intelligent and educated as himself could be so thoroughly duped.

A door opened and closed somewhere in his house. Footsteps got closer. He quickly exited the spyware and clicked on his favorite game of solitaire.

“Hei,” she said after opening the door, “what are you doing?”

“Nothing. Just my solitaire.”

Lie upon lie.

~ ~ ~

Harald Sohlberg hurried away from his parent’s home. He had been looking forward to his three week summer vacation until the phone call from Ivar Thorsen. He turned and looked fondly at his ancestral home.

The older Sohlbergs had insisted that he and his wife stay at their home on Fiskekroken or Fish Hook Drive in Ulvøya Island. His parents now spent most of the year living in the United States of America with his younger brother the petroleum engineer who lived in Houston Texas working for British Petroleum. His parent’s generosity in providing free lodging at Fiskekroken meant that Interpol would save a fortune in hotel bills because Oslo was far more expensive than insanely overpriced cities like Tokyo and London and Moscow.

A block away Sohlberg walked past the grand old home where Thorsen had grown up while his mother worked as a maid for the bank executive. In the distance he saw a swimming pool through the trees and wondered if the banker or his wife or his son still lived there.

Sohlberg looked with suspicion at Ulvøya’s attractive gardens and beaches. He knew how well the lovely yards and shores would temporarily trick residents into forgetting during the summer months that they lived in sub-Arctic Norway where six months from now they’d be in the dark in sub-freezing weather.