The Writing on the Wall (10 page)

BERGEN WAS GOING THROUGH
a new building boom, not unlike the one in the seventies. Then it had been banks that had mushroomed on the corner of every block. Now it was hotels. Some people might be tempted to say that tourism had taken over where finance had left off. But if you looked closer at who owned the hotels, it was clear that, in reality, it was only a matter of changing horses. The people behind it all, and the money with which they speculated were still the same.

The hotel where Judge Brandt had spent his final hours had always been looked upon as one of the best in town, even though a string of different owners over the past few decades had taken a bit of the shine off the reputation it had enjoyed during its heyday. I walked through reception, heading for the restaurant on the first floor, but carried on up the stairs, passed the
cloakroom
attached to the sitting rooms on the second floor and from there continued on up.

Considering it was a Friday, there was a good deal of activity in the corridors. It was clear that the last business guests of the week had hung on to their rooms as long as possible, and that a lot of guests were expected for the weekend, perhaps attending some congress or other.

The chambermaids hurried past, trolleys piled high with bed linen, clean and dirty, stacks of towels and freshly opened cartons of cleaning materials. At strategic points along the corridors stood red plastic crates that quickly filled up with empty bottles from the vacated rooms.

I stopped one of the chambermaids, a sturdy red-haired piece with freckles and a smile that soon became a frown when, assuming my most official voice, I asked: ‘It was you who found Judge Brandt dead, wasn’t it?’

‘Me? No way!’ she said, her alarm emphasising her Sognefjord accent. ‘It was Annebeth, but she’s not in today!’

‘Oh?’

‘She’s been off sick ever since …’

‘But –’

‘Have a word with Gro Anita. They’re flatmates!’

‘And where can I find her?’

‘On the fifth floor. She’s a big dark lass …’

I thanked her and went off in search of her workmate, two floors above.

I ran into her emerging from one of the rooms, her arms full of bed linen. She was not only large and dark but also very pretty with a flattened out southern accent, making it hard to place.

Her brown eyes looked at me apologetically as soon as I appeared in the doorway. ‘Is this your room, sir? We’re running a bit behind, see, but reception told me you two wouldn’t be
checking
in before three.’

‘I’m not a guest, actually.’

She pulled a face, pouting slightly with her full lips. ‘So where are you from? Department of Employment?’ She squeezed past me into the corridor and turned right.

I followed her. ‘No, I’d like to have a word with Annebeth.’

‘She’s off sick!’ she said, disappearing through an open door.

From the door I saw her chuck the dirty linen into a large basket and with quick movements of her hands start to take down a clean set from the shelves along the walls. ‘Yes, so she’s in hospital, is she?’

‘No, she’s at home.’

‘But in that case, she surely ought to be able –’

‘Mind your back!’ she ordered. ‘Look, I’m really pushed!’

I stepped aside and trotted after her back to the room she’d just come from. Without so much as a glance at me, she began to make the bed.

‘It’s quite important.’

She paused for a moment, straightened up and grimaced as she placed her hands in the small of her back. ‘Who for? You haven’t even told me your name yet!’

I smiled apologetically. ‘No, I’m sorry, but you – I haven’t had time. My name’s Veum. I represent Judge Brandt’s insurance company, and it’s just a few details about the death that we –’

‘Whether he took his own life, eh?’

‘Well …’

‘Then his old woman wouldn’t get a penny, right?’

‘Yes, of course, but that rule only applies – for the first two years after the papers have been signed … but …’

She looked at me defiantly. ‘Yes, well I can’t help you!’

‘Not even with Annebeth’s address?’

‘Oh, all right then …’ She looked me up and down in the
practised
way of someone accustomed to fending off heavy advances from travelling salesmen who were still half-asleep. ‘We share a small flat in Steinkjellergaten.’ She gave me the number and the floor.

I smiled. ‘We’re practically neighbours, then.’

‘Hope that doesn’t mean we’re going to be stuck with you hanging round the door every evening from now on!’

‘Are there a lot who do that?’

‘Enough to be going on with!’ Sighing, she leaned over the bed again but not as a prelude to any dalliance; it looked more as though she was on the rack to judge by her expression.

I shot out of the door before she had time to ask me the name of Brandt’s insurance company and whether I had any identification.

♦

Steinkjellergaten is at the end of the old road into Bergen from the north. New sets had been put down, but the buildings along Steinkjellergaten still retained a historic look, and the gradient was unchanged.

The address I’d been given was in the narrowest part of the street. The two girls shared a flat on the second floor according to a handwritten cardboard sign that said:
Gro Anita Vebjørnsen and Annebeth Larsson
. The last three words had been added later with a different biro.

The varnished door was newer than the house. To the left of it was a narrow window. The light from the hall inside was just visible through the ribbed frosted glass.

I pressed the white button on the black doorbell.

After a while I heard hesitant padding footsteps within as though the occupant were an old lady. Then silence. No one made any attempt to open the door. It was as if she was just standing there waiting, hoping that whoever had rung the bell would go away.

But I’d rung too many doorbells in my life to give up that easily.

This time I got an answer. ‘Who is it?’ asked a muffled voice behind the thick door.

‘My name’s Veum. I’m from – the insurance company.’

After a moment’s thought there was a rattle in the lock and the door opened a crack to reveal a narrow female face peering
anxiously
at me. ‘What do you want?’

‘It’s about Judge Brandt. We need to clear up a few details.’

She had wispy blonde shoulder-length hair, unbrushed, and she peered at me over her large gold-rimmed glasses that had slipped a little too far down her nose. She was pale with slightly feverish rosy cheeks and wasn’t wearing much more than a blue-and-white quilted dressing gown. ‘Have you any identification?’

I gave her my driving licence, and she studied it carefully. ‘It doesn’t say anything about an insurance company here,’ she said suspiciously.

I took out one of the visiting cards I’d got a printer friend to run me off before he went bust and set fire to the whole shooting match. If she was pernickety enough to ring to check the number on the card, she’d get no further than my answerphone, which neutrally recorded everything that came in, from funeral dirges to doomsday trumpets. In that case, I hoped she would understand that the Nemesis Insurance Company was one of the smallest and that the telephone operator was at lunch just then.

But she was not that pernickety. She handed both driving licence and visiting card back to me, swung open the door and muttered faintly, ‘I hope it won’t take too long. I’m off sick.’

I went into the hall, waited till she had closed the door behind us and followed her into what turned out to be a kitchen looking out onto the back, where a February pigeon sat pecking forlornly at the window frame in the hope of finding some insects that had survived the winter.

She had been sitting at the kitchen table with a magazine open at the crossword and a half-empty cup of coffee beside it. I pulled out a wicker chair, sat down and had a quick look round the room before taking out my notebook and assuming an official air.

The room had a sort of half-hearted feminine look about it, with clear signs that it had been furnished by two different people with utterly different tastes. One of them had a preference for large flowery patterns in the curtains, the other for a kind of simple, almost cryptic style, represented in the wallpaper.

‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ she asked, and when I nodded, I had the pleasure of seeing her stretch to take a mug from one of the shelves in the kitchen cupboard. Under her dressing gown she was wearing tight-fitting teenage-style pyjama trousers in pink cotton with small flowers, and she had stuffed her bare feet into deep red slippers with big pompoms on them, borrowed from some diva she had forgotten to return them to. Unless, that is, it was Gro Anita they belonged to. I wasn’t in any particular doubt about which of them liked flowers and pompoms, and which had the simpler style.

She poured coffee from a pale yellow flask, pushed the
magazine
out of the way and looked at me inquiringly.

I nodded towards the half-finished crossword. ‘That’s just what a sudden death is like. A long row of unanswered questions and a form you have to fill in bit-by-bit, down and across, until – if you’re lucky and have a good dictionary – you’ve completed it. Filled out what actually happened.’

She shifted uneasily. She felt her forehead with the back of her hand as though to emphasise the fact that she had a temperature. Her lips were dry and cracked with white blotches against the darker flesh.

‘And there are still some clues we haven’t found answers to,’ I went on.

She fluttered her eyelashes, not from any attempt to make an impression but rather like someone suddenly emerging into very harsh daylight. Yet still she said nothing.

‘As I was saying … not to beat about the bush … You were the one who found him, weren’t you?’

She nodded, shifting her gaze to the window. The pigeon was no longer there, as if it had sensed danger. The same snowflakes fell steadily over the city as though from a never-ending supply, but did not stick, because the thermometer was still a fraction above zero.

‘Can you tell me what happened?’

When she eventually spoke it was so softly that I had to lower my head to hear what she said. ‘I don’t know what had gone on in there … I just – found him.’

‘Yes, I see, but … You knew he was there, did you?’

‘Yes, we’d been told that the room was taken till two o’clock.’

‘Was that normal?’

Her gaze shifted again. ‘Y-yes … It often happens that guests need the rooms a bit longer.’

‘Yes, but I meant … you’d seen the judge before, hadn’t you?’

‘Yes, he … they said he often had important meetings there … conferences.’

‘Mm.’ I looked reassuringly at her.

‘So … I’d seen him there before.’

‘And … did you see who he had these – meetings with before?’

‘Er, sometimes … Yes.’

‘Was it – men?’

She did not answer.

‘Women?’

She nodded.

‘Different women?’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Er, maybe.’

‘Young women?’

She pursed her lips.

‘
Very
young?’

A further nod. ‘I’ll say!’

‘Oh?’

‘No, I just meant, you wouldn’t have caught me doing it! Even if they paid me a fortune!’

‘Yes, that’s probably what most people would think.’

‘The old pig! He got no more than he –’ She stopped herself abruptly, horrified at what she had just been about to say.

I took out the newspaper cutting showing a picture of Torild Skagestøl, put it on the kitchen table and pushed it over to her. ‘This girl here, was she one of them?’

She glanced quickly at the picture, almost as though she was afraid of being recognised. She nodded faintly. Then she leaned closer and had a good look at it before nodding with much greater conviction. ‘Hair a bit different maybe, and a much more brazen look on her face but – yes …’ She looked me straight in the eye. ‘I’m sure it’s her!’

I leaned forwards. ‘Sure it was her the day we’re talking about as well?’

She looked uncertain. ‘Er, I think so, but … I didn’t see her so clearly that day, but – it was nearly always her! Quite a few times. I’m sure of it now … When she passed me, well, us, in the corridor, she just looked straight at us with the most brazen look you can imagine – as if we, as if we didn’t get what she was up to in there, as if we didn’t know what she was!’

I felt a strange buzz, a mixture of satisfaction and fear.
Satisfaction
at what I’d already figured out; fear at what it could only imply. ‘But … OK. Let’s go back to the day we’re talking about – last Friday, right?’

She confirmed it with a faint nod.

‘Tell me how it was that you … that you found him.’

She pushed her large glasses back up the bridge of her nose but hadn’t got many words out before they’d slipped back down. ‘It was her I saw first … She was … she seemed in a real hurry because on her way to the lift she was still tucking her blouse into her slacks, but when she – saw me …’

‘Yes?’

‘I was just coming out of a room at the end of the corridor, and … when she saw me, she turned straight back as though …’ She searched for the right expression. ‘Well, she didn’t want to be seen, in a way. Then she disappeared round the corner where she must definitely have taken the stairs instead.’

‘Did her behaviour strike you as unusual?’

‘Yes, but not in that way …’

‘Was that when you went into their room?’

‘No, no, it wasn’t two o’clock yet, and they had the room …’ She lost the thread of what she was saying.

‘I see. And then?’

‘Then – I did the other rooms.’

‘What time was it when you got to Brandt’s room, then?’

‘I didn’t look at my watch – twenty past two, something like that, according to what the police said. At any rate it was twenty-five past two when they were telephoned from reception.’

‘Tell me what happened.’

‘Nothing
happened
. When I went to the room I knocked and waited, the way we’re always supposed to. But he could have gone while I was doing one of the other rooms, so … when there was no reply I let myself in with the key.’ She put her hand over her mouth as though the memory of what she had seen there was so strong that she involuntarily had to go through her own physical reactions again.