The Man in the Window (14 page)

Chapter 17

Evening Mood

    Eva-Britt served fried Arctic char and made a lot of fuss about the trouble she had gone to in order to lay her hands on some. At first he ignored the cutting remarks, but he didn't escape. She attacked his complacency, and went on with her usual rant about his lack of commitment to the relationship, and his escapism which manifested itself in indifference since he had not even bothered to buy fish on the way home as she had asked. Of course, she had known he would forget everything and had therefore done the shopping herself. He studied her noticeboard for the duration of the tirade.
Home
, he thought to himself, contemplating the postcard he had once sent her from a course in Bergen, the row of Beaujolais nouveau wine labels, the other cards from her friends, all with the conspicuously similar Mediterranean beach scenes, and right at the bottom a few words of wisdom signed by Piet Hein. He knew he would explode if he made an effort to answer. Her goal was to vent all her pent-up frustration before the meal, an objective which he was generous enough to let her achieve without any interruptions so that he could have the first beer of the evening without her starting up again.

    After they had eaten Frank Frølich sat thinking about Ingrid Jespersen. He couldn't get the thought out of his head that she had lived for a quarter of a century with a man who was a quarter of a century older than her. He and Eva-Britt occupied their fixed places in her living room - in front of her new widescreen TV. He turned the volume right down and zapped between channels. But he had picked a bad time. There were advertisements or crap series about young celebs on every channel. On Eurosport there was a boxing match between two roly-poly welterweights waddling around the ring. Every time he pressed the remote control the TV screen flashed, sending bluish-green tints along the walls towards Eva-Britt who was curled up in her new, white armchair from Ikea. She was immersed in a book by a writer called Melissa Banks and immune to his boredom. Frank switched off the television.

    'Why do women decide to marry older men?' he asked.

    Eva-Britt raised her head and sent him a distant look.

    'I was just wondering why young women marry older men.'

    'In fact I'm older than you,' Eva-Britt said. 'Eight months.'

    'Mm…' He considered how to express himself. 'Do you remember Rita?'

    Eva-Britt looked up from her book again. 'Rita?'

    'She was in the year above us at school.'

    'Oh, her.' Eva-Britt flicked through the book absent-mindedly, helping herself to a biscuit from the dish on the table and taking a nibble.

    'She was with… Anders, the dark-haired guy… almost five years older than her…'

    'Mm.' Eva-Britt smiled at something she was reading.

    'There was always such a terrible to-do at parties. No one wanted to invite him while Rita was always nagging and pushing for him to be invited. Do you remember that?'

    Eva-Britt was munching the biscuit.

    'Weren't you in love with Anders, too?'

    'Hey?' She looked up.

    'There was something between you and him. At one party…'

    Eva-Britt put the book down. Frank could see her ear- lobes going pink. 'What are you going on about now?'

    'I was wondering why women choose older men.'

    'I'm not in the slightest bit interested in older men!'

    'Did I say you were?'

    'You're talking about things that happened many years ago!'

    Frank sighed. 'When you're with Trude, the only thing you talk about is your schooldays,' he countered. 'Teachers, crushes and all the so-called crazy things you did to celebrate the end of school!'

    She took a deep breath. There was an ominous hard look in her eyes. He didn't have the stamina for her to crank it up again so late in the evening. Time to row to the shore, he thought with a diplomatic smile. 'You see, I've interviewed this woman who is twenty-five years younger than her husband. I mean, she's attractive, elegant and all that, but she chose such an old man. I don't understand.'

    'That's because you're thinking the wrong way around. Women don't choose older men. It's older men who chase younger women!' 'Mm,' he sighed, trying to imagine Ingrid Jespersen being courted by older men. What did she have in common with the dead man, except for an interest in design, he wondered. The same taste in music? Friends? She had been interested in literature - he hadn't. On the other hand, the son was interested in literature - Karsten.

    Eva-Britt had opened her book again, but was looking at him with gentler eyes now. 'Does it have to be a mystery? It could be true love,' she suggested silkily.

    He gave an ironic smile. 'True love?'

    She sent him a meaningful glance from over the top of the book. 'Like ours.'

    He side-stepped the provocation and said: 'If it wasn't true love - like ours - what could it be?'

    'Is he rich?'

    'Presume so.'

    'Has she got a difficult relationship with her father… I mean… are her parents divorced… or is her father a sailor?'

    'I have no idea.'

    'Money and/or no father figure,' Eva-Britt suggested, searching for the right page in her book. 'Young girls, on the other hand,' she smiled, tucking her legs beneath her on the chair, 'young girls choose slightly older boys because they have fewer pimples, broader shoulders and are a bit more experienced than certain other boys.'

    Frank Frølich switched the television back on.

    'Are you bored?' she asked.

    He lifted the remote control and pressed. 'Bored? No…'

Chapter 18

Salsa

    The pick-up arm refused to lift. The sound in the loudspeakers was reminiscent of worn windscreen wipers rubbing against a dry windscreen. At last Gunnarstranda got out of his chair, went over to the record player, activated the lever to raise the arm and blew away the dust that had gathered on the stylus. Then he lowered the stylus down. The old Tandberg speakers emitted scratching sounds until the first guitar notes of Peggy Lee's 'Love is Just Around the Corner' stole into the room. Gunnarstranda stood for a few reflective moments by the window. He held his hand against the glass and felt the cold penetrating the pane. Then he almost pressed his face against the glass to read the temperature on the outside thermometer with the fading blue numbers. Minus 23. Down on the pavement in Bergensgata a woman wearing a coat walked into the yellow glare of the streetlamp. She was taking a lean setter for its evening walk. The dog did not enjoy the cold weather. Its movements, which would normally be supple and bouncy, were reluctant and stiff; its head and tail trailed along the ground. The woman seemed to be dragging it along. The policeman watched them for a little while until he sat back at his desk. He stared down at the scrap of paper on which he had jotted the code that been written in pen on the murdered man's chest. He rested his head on his hands without taking his eyes off the numbers. In the end he grabbed the almost full bottle of Ballantine's which was on the tray beside the typewriter and twisted off the cork. He poured two centimetres of whisky into a tumbler. As he raised the glass to drink, the telephone rang. He took the receiver.

    'Is that you?' It was Yttergjerde's voice.

    Gunnarstranda swallowed and felt the spirit burn its way down to his stomach. 'What did you say?' he rasped.

    'You're usually so abrupt on the phone,' Yttergjerde said. 'I was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong.'

    'What do you want?' Gunnarstranda asked.

    'She's got a man,' Yttergjerde said.

    'Name?'

    'Eyolf Strømsted. Runs a dance school. Looks like that anyway. This evening there was a salsa course and African dance. You should have seen it, a black man with a drum and about fifty Norwegian women shaking their butts.'

    'And our lady?'

    'At first I thought she was on the course, but she went straight to this guy wearing yellow pants and a silver shirt. He had a microphone round his neck, the kind of loop thing in front of his mouth that TV hosts have. He gyrated and jigged through the dancers, and when he screamed into the mike, you could hear him in the speakers along with the music - what are you listening to you by the way?'

    Gunnarstranda looked across at the record player. 'A singer. Jazz ballads.'

    'Not quite the same beat, no, this was salsa. When she arrived, there was a bit of a commotion because the guy had to get someone else to take over.'

    'Did she see you? Were you in the same room?'

    'There were loads of people there. She didn't see me.'

    'Go on.'

    'They went outside to the car and drove off. So I followed them. They parked in the car lot outside the Munch museum. Sort of discreet, under the trees by the fence around Toyen Park. And there I watched them sitting and smooching for almost forty minutes, so I guess it must have been more than smooching. She drove the guy back to the dance school and went home.'

    'And you?'

    'When the widow had gone, I was off duty and went back to the dance school. At last the guy came out and locked up. He walked home. Lives in Jacob Aalls gate, in Majorstua. That's where I found his name. He shot up the stairs about five minutes ago.'

    'Good work, Yttergjerde. It's cold. You should go home and get warm.'

    'I'm never cold,' whinnied Yttergjerde. 'In this freezing weather people take cod liver oil and vitamins, but there's no point - what counts is eating spicy food. You should remember that. Just add three or four cloves of garlic to your eggs for breakfast, and red chilli peppers, best if they're so hot you can't breathe and break out into sweat. With that kind of firepower on board your hands will never be cold. You can walk around in minus 2o with your shirt off and still the steam will be coming off you. Not one germ, not one virus, will get a hold inside your mouth. Your breath will kill healthy potted plants. You become immortal, man, immortal.'

    'Yes, yes,' said Gunnarstranda.

    'Yes,' said Yttergjerde.

    'Sleep tight,' Gunnarstranda said and put down the telephone before his colleague could give him the recipe for a good night's sleep. He took the tumbler and drank the rest of the whisky. Then he picked up the ballpoint pen and drew a triangle on the scrap of paper. In the two bottom corners he wrote the names Ingrid and Reidar Folke Jespersen. In the top corner he wrote Eyolf Strømsted. Finally, he put three crosses under the triangle. Three crosses, and he was careful to draw them like those on the forehead of Jespersen's body.

Chapter 19

The Parked Car

    When Frølich entered the office, Gunnarstranda was engrossed in the Aftenposten. 'Anything about us in there?' he enquired.

    Gunnarstranda shook his head.

    'And the will?' Frølich asked.

    Gunnarstranda lowered his paper. 'Disappointing. Just a list of specific items of property - Karsten would get some wardrobe, that sort of thing. The old boy doesn't say anything about anyone being cut out or favoured. No secret beneficiaries, nothing. There's just a list of about twenty to thirty items and who will get them - that is to say: Ingrid and Karsten.'

    'What's the upshot of him revoking the will?'

    'It means his estate will be thrown into one big pot. Ingrid will get half of the broth plus her share of the old boy's legacy. Karsten will be paid off. That's all. The revocation of the will just means that Karsten and Ingrid have to argue about who gets what.'

    'But why change such a crappy will a few hours before he is murdered?'

    Gunnarstranda sighed in response. 'Yet another mystery in our files.'

    'What sort of things were on the list?'

    'Wardrobes, pornographic Chinese carvings, that sort of thing. I wrote it all down. What about you?'

    Frølich sighed and rubbed his eyes. 'I've interviewed every single occupant of their block,' he said, consulting his notes. 'Interested?'

    'Give me the edited highlights.'

    'On the ground floor only shops. As far as the first floor is concerned, it's occupied by Ingrid Jespersen. On the second there's a married couple in one flat - herr and fru Holmgren. Both between fifty and sixty. He works for a tool agency. She's his secretary. They didn't hear a thing on Friday. They were watching TV and went to bed at about half past twelve. The man's mother, Aslaug Holmgren, lives in the adjacent flat. She's almost eighty, same age as the dead man, and she thinks Reidar Folke Jespersen was an
arrogant
,
snobbish buffoon
, but had nothing to tell us about the evening in question. Her hearing isn't so good, and she usually goes to bed after watching a series about the FIB, as she called them. She didn't approve of NRK putting on crime programmes so late. Also, she wanted
Oberinspektor Derrick
back on TV and thought we police could learn a lot from it. Said she went to bed at eleven and didn't hear a thing.'

    Inspector Gunnarstranda chewed his lower lip, deep in thought. 'And that's all the people who live in the building?' he asked.

    'I crossed the street too,' Frølich said. 'Got a nibble there. A mysterious car.'

    'Oh yes?'

    'I tried to work out who would have had a view of the shop. Since the killing took place at night, in practice that meant quite a lot of flats.'

   'What sort of people?'

    'Cross-section of Oslo 3: a typographer who works on a newspaper -
Vart Land.
He lives on his own with a dog. Then there's a young couple - he's a cameraman with TV Norge; she works for
Dagbladet.
I spoke to a publishing editor who said she would also ask her children. She has two teenagers who weren't there at the time. She thought she had seen a taxi parked outside the antiques shop for at least an hour - that's what she maintained anyway.'

    'A taxi?'

    Frølich nodded. 'And that's the only hot tip so far. A taxi - I asked whether the roof light was on or not. It was. She said she thought it was strange that the taxi's engine was running, or that it was there for so long.'

    'How long?'

    'At least an hour, she guessed. The problem is that this was early evening, before ten - she said. Seems she had been working late - she had been to a meeting and didn't get home until eight, half an hour after Jespersen arrived. She wasn't sure whether the taxi was already there when she got in. But after taking a shower she looked through the window and saw it parked beneath her flat with the engine running. At least three quarters of an hour later she looked again and the same car was still there.'

    'Had she…?'

    'I'm coming to that,' Frølich interrupted. 'She looked out again later - before going to bed. There was a Mercedes taxi parked in the road. She thought the taxi with the engine running - the one she had seen before - had also been a Mercedes. But the car she saw on her way to bed - its engine wasn't running.'

    'Colour?'

    'Dark.'

    The two detectives stared at each other.

    'It could have been three different taxis,' Gunnarstranda said. 'Every second taxi in Oslo is a Mercedes - at least. And this is one of the most densely populated areas of the city.'

    'Two men live in the top flat,' Frølich continued. 'One of them works in local radio and calls himself "Terje Telemonster". Perhaps you've heard of the guy? He rings people up and is a kind of telephone terrorist. If the victim works in a hotel he rings and says he's on night duty and has been locked in a broom cupboard and he's starving, or he rings the emergency doctor and says he's on top of his wife and can't get his ding-a-ling out of her muff. Very funny guy.'

    'Sounds extremely funny,' Gunnarstranda said, deadpan.

    'It's popular anyway. And he lives with a sort of drag artist, a guy who's into Egyptian stuff. He does belly- dancing. And male belly dancers are a bit special.'

    'Well? Had they seen anything?'

    'Nothing. The taxi was all I managed to turn up,' Frølich summarized.

    'What impression did people have of our old man?'

    'Anonymous, elderly. Those who knew who he was connected him with the shop. Only Holmgren and his wife knew he was married to Ingrid. Several people recognize her - because she's kept herself in shape.' Frølich grinned and mimicked them: 'Oh, is that who you mean? The good-looking one, no spring chicken, but she keeps herself in good shape.'

    'Great,' Gunnarstranda mumbled.

    'The man who lived alone, with a dog, asked if I knew anything about the person stealing his newspaper. He seemed a bit manic - had put a wide-angle lens in the door to see who was stealing his newspaper every morning.'

    'Observant?'

    'I thought that too, but the problem is that all his attention is focused on the door. He couldn't tell me anything about activity in the street. And this couple - the man working for TV Norge and the woman for
Dagbladet -
had been out to a seafood evening and didn't come back until five o'clock in the morning.'

    'And didn't see anything?'

    'Zilch. They returned in a taxi, but neither of them noticed any parked cars when they came home. I have the licence number of the taxi they came home in. The TV cameraman had kept the receipt, so I'll talk to the taxi driver - he may have seen something. But the two of them had been pretty pissed and staggered into bed without noticing the shop window across the street or anything. By the way, they were able to confirm that the window was never lit at night.'

    Gunnarstranda wiped his upper lip. 'I came across something the son - Karsten - has written,' he mumbled, wiping his lip again.

    'Where?'

    'I stumbled across an article in an old journal - amazing what you hang onto really,' Gunnarstranda said. 'A back-copy of
Farmand.''

    'Farmand?'

    'An old organ for reactionary intellectuals, a journal that died a death many years ago.'

    'What did he write about?'

    'The prison system.'

    'My God. Is he any good? At writing?'

    Gunnarstranda opened the top drawer of his desk and rummaged. 'There was quite an interesting bit about a man who went mental in solitary confinement, but the rest was…' Gunnarstranda shrugged, produced a pair of tweezers from the drawer, stood up and went to the mirror hanging on the wall beside the door and continued: '… banal reflections on the treatment of criminals, but strangely enough there was none of the usual harping on about custody and human rights.'

    'Must have been editorial guidelines,' Frølich said. 'If the journal was reactionary, as you say.'

    Gunnarstranda took a concentrated hold on the tweezers and pulled out a hair from his nostril. He scrutinized his catch carefully. 'Must have been,' he conceded. 'I think you may well be right.'