The Redbreast (25 page)

‘Absolutely.’

‘A pillar of society?’

‘The door to positions of national importance in finance and politics would probably have been closed to him.’

‘But he could have been an independent businessman, an entrepreneur. Definitely someone who has earned enough money to buy a weapon for half a million. Who could he possibly be after?’

‘Does this necessarily have anything to do with his having fought at the front?’

‘I have a sneaking feeling it might.’

‘A motive for revenge then?’

‘Is that so unreasonable?’

‘No, not at all. Many men from the front see themselves as the real patriots in the war. They think that, given the way the world looked in 1940, they acted in the best interests of the nation. They consider the fact that we sentenced them as traitors to be a total travesty of justice.’

‘So?’

Juul scratched behind his ear.

‘Well. The judges involved in bringing them to justice are by and large dead now. And the same is true of the politicians who laid the basis for the trials. The revenge theory seems thin.’

Harry sighed. ‘You’re right. I’m only trying to form a picture with the few pieces of the puzzle I have.’

Juul glanced quickly at his watch. ‘I promise I’ll give it some thought, but I really don’t know if I can help you.’

‘Thanks anyway,’ Harry said, getting up. Then he remembered something and pulled out a pile of folded sheets of paper from his jacket pocket.

‘By the way, I took a copy of my report of the interview with a witness in Johannesburg. If you could have a look to see whether there’s anything of significance in it?’

Juul said yes, but shook his head as if meaning no.

As Harry was putting on his shoes in the hall, he pointed to the photograph of the man in the white coat.

‘Is that you?’

‘In the first half of the previous century, yes,’ Juul laughed. ‘It was taken in Germany before the war. I was supposed to follow in my father’s and grandfather’s footsteps and study medicine there. When the war broke out I made my way home and in fact got my hands on my first history books on the boat. After that it was too late: I was hooked.’

‘So you gave up medicine?’

‘Depends on how you look at it. I wanted to try to find an explanation of how one man and one ideology could bewitch so many people. And perhaps find an antidote, too.’ He laughed. ‘I was very, very young.’

37
First Floor, Continental Hotel. 1 March 2000.

‘N
ICE THAT WE COULD MEET LIKE THIS
,’ B
ERNT
B
RANDHAUG
said, raising his wineglass.

They toasted and Aud Hilde smiled at the Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

‘And not only on official business,’ he said, holding her gaze until she looked down. Brandhaug studied her. She wasn’t exactly attractive, her features were a little too coarse for that and she was certainly plump, but she had a charming, flirty way about her and she was
young
plump.

She had rung him from the staff office this morning saying they needed his advice on an unusual case, but before she could say any more he had asked her up to his office. And when she was there he had immediately decided he didn’t have the time and they could discuss it over a meal after work.

‘We civil servants should also have a few perks,’ he had said. She presumed he meant the meal.

So far everything had gone well. The head waiter had given them Brandhaug’s regular table and, to the best of his knowledge, there was no one he knew in the room.

‘Yes, there’s this strange case we had yesterday,’ she said, letting the waiter unfold the napkin over her lap. ‘We had a visit from an elderly man who maintained that we owed him money. The Foreign Office, that is. Almost two million kroner, he said, referring to a letter he had sent in 1970.’

She rolled her eyes. She shouldn’t wear so much make-up, Brandhaug thought.

‘So what did we owe him money for?’

‘He said he was a merchant seaman during the war. It was something to do with Nortraship. They had withheld his pay.’

‘Oh, yes, I think I know what it was about. What else did he say?’

‘That he couldn’t wait any longer. That we had cheated him and all the other merchant seamen. God would punish us for our sins. I don’t know if he had been drinking or he was ill, but he looked under the weather. He brought a letter with him, signed by the Norwegian Consul General in Bombay in 1944, who guaranteed, on behalf of the Norwegian state, the back payment of the war-risk bonus for four years’ service as an officer in the Norwegian merchant navy. Had it not been for the letter, we would have just given him the heave-ho of course, and we wouldn’t have bothered you with this trivial matter.’

‘You can come to me any time you wish, Aud Hilde,’ he said, with a sudden stab of panic: her name was Aud Hilde, wasn’t it?

‘Poor man,’ Brandhaug said, gesturing to the waiter to bring more wine. ‘The sad thing about this case is that he is actually right. Nortraship was established to administer the boats in the merchant fleet that the Germans had not already captured. It was an organisation with partly political and partly commercial interests. The British, for example, paid large sums in risk bonuses to Nortraship to use Norwegian shipping. But the money, instead of being used to pay the crews, went straight into the ship-owners’ pockets and the state’s coffers. We’re talking about several hundred million kroner here. The merchant seamen tried to get their money back through legal proceedings, but they lost their case in the Supreme Court in 1954. The Storting passed an act in 1972, establishing that merchant seamen had a right to this money.’

‘This man doesn’t seem to have received anything. Because he was in the China Sea and was torpedoed by the Japanese and not by the Germans, he said.’

‘Did he say what his name was?’

‘Konrad Åsnes. Wait a moment and I’ll show you the letter. He had worked out how much was owed with compound interest.’

She bent to look in her bag. Her upper arms quivered. She should do a bit more exercise, Brandhaug thought. Four kilos less and Aud Hilde would simply be well-rounded instead of . . . fat.

‘It’s alright,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to see it. Nortraship comes under the Ministry of Commerce.’

She looked up at him.

‘He insisted we were the ones who owed him the money. He gave us a deadline of two weeks.’

Brandhaug laughed.

‘Did he? And what’s the rush now, after sixty years?’

‘He didn’t say. He only said that we would have to take the consequences if we didn’t pay.’

‘My goodness.’ Brandhaug waited until the waiter had poured out more wine for them before leaning forward. ‘I hate taking the consequences, don’t you?’ She flashed him a hesitant smile.

Brandhaug raised his glass.

‘I was wondering what we should do about this case?’ she said.

‘Forget it,’ he said. ‘But I was also wondering one thing, Aud Hilde.’

‘What’s that?’

‘If you’ve seen the hotel room we have at our disposal here.’

Aud Hilde smiled again and said she hadn’t.

38
Focus Fitness Centre, Ila. 2 March 2000.

H
ARRY WAS PEDALLING AND SWEATING
. T
HE CARDIO
-vascular room was equipped with eighteen hyper-modern ergometric exercise bikes, all occupied by ‘urban’, generally speaking, attractive people staring at the mute TV monitor hanging from the ceiling. Harry was watching Elisa in
The Robinson Expedition
mouthing that she couldn’t stand Poppe. Harry knew. It was a repeat.

That don’t impress me much!
rang out from the loudspeakers.

No, well, there’s a surprise, Harry thought, who liked neither the loud music nor the rasping sounds that could be heard coming from somewhere in his lungs. He could have worked out for nothing in the gym at Police HQ, but Ellen had persuaded him to join the Focus centre. He had gone along with that, but drew the line when she tried to get him to join an aerobics class. Moving in time to canned music with a troupe of people who all liked canned music while an instructor with a rictus smile encouraged greater exertion with such verbal wit as ‘no pain, no gain’ was for Harry an incomprehensible form of voluntary self-abasement. The way he saw it, the biggest advantage of Focus was that he could work out and watch
The Robinson Expedition
without having to be in the same room as Tom Waaler, who appeared to spend most of his free time in the police gym. Harry cast a quick glance around and confirmed that tonight, as usual, he was the oldest person there. Most people in the room were girls, with Walkmans plugged into their ears, sneaking a look in his direction at regular intervals. Not because they were looking at him, but because Norway’s most popular stand-up comic sat next to him in a grey hoodie without a drop of sweat beneath his jaunty forelock. A message flashed up on Harry’s speedometer console:
You’re training well
.

But dressing badly
, Harry thought, looking down at his limp, faded jogging bottoms, which he had to keep hitching up because of the mobile phone hanging on the waistband. And his tired Adidas trainers were neither new enough to be modern or old enough to be trendy again. The Joy Division T-shirt which had once held some kind of street cred just sent out the signal that he hadn’t been following what was happening on the music scene for a number of years. But Harry didn’t feel completely – completely – in the cold until his phone began to bleep and he noticed that seventeen reproachful pairs of eyes, including the stand-up comic’s, were directed at him. He unhooked the tiny black devil’s machine from his waistband.

‘Hole.’

That don’t impress me much
! again.

‘It’s Juul. Am I disturbing?’

‘No, it’s just music.’

‘You’re wheezing like a walrus. Ring me back when it’s more convenient.’

‘It’s convenient now. I’m at the gym.’

‘Alright. I have good news. I’ve read your report from Johannesburg. Why didn’t you say he’d been to Sennheim?’

‘Uriah? Is that important? I wasn’t even sure I had the name right. I looked for it on a map of Germany but I couldn’t find any Sennheim.’

‘The answer to your question is yes, it is important. If you’ve been in any doubt as to whether he fought at the front, you can be reassured now. It’s one hundred per cent certain. Sennheim is a little place and the only Norwegians I’ve heard of who have been there went during the war. To the training camp before leaving for the Eastern Front. The reason you didn’t find Sennheim on a map of Germany is because it isn’t in Germany, but in French Alsace.’

‘Yes, but . . .’

‘Alsace has alternated between being French and German throughout its history, that’s why they speak German there. The fact that our man has been to Sennheim reduces the number of potential candidates drastically. You see, only men from the
Nordland
and
Norge
regiments received their training there. And even better – I can give you the name of a person who was in Sennheim and would almost certainly be willing to help.’

‘Really?’

‘A soldier from the
Nordland
regiment who fought at the front. He joined us in the Resistance as a volunteer in 1944.’

‘Wow.’

‘He grew up on a remote farm with his parents and elder brothers, who were all fanatical NS people, and was forced to sign up for service at the front. He himself was never a convinced Nazi, and in 1943 he deserted near Leningrad. He was briefly in Russian captivity and fought alongside the Russians before managing to get back to Norway via Sweden.’

‘Did you trust a soldier from the Eastern Front?’

Juul laughed. ‘Absolutely.’

‘Why are you laughing?’

‘It’s a long story.’

‘I’ve got plenty of time.’

‘We ordered him to eliminate a member of his family.’

Harry stopped pedalling. Juul cleared his throat.

‘When we found him in Nordmarka, just north of Ullevålseter, at first we didn’t believe his story. We thought he was an infiltrator and we were of a mind to shoot him. We had connections in the Oslo police archives, which meant that we could check his story, and it turned out in fact that he had been reported missing at the front. He was presumed to have deserted. His family background checked out and he had papers showing he was who he said he was. All of this could have been fabricated by the Germans, of course, so we decided to put him to the test.’

Pause.

‘And?’

‘We hid him in a hut, away from both us and the Germans. Someone suggested that we should order him to eliminate one of his brothers in the
Nasjonal Samling
. The main idea was to see how he would react. He didn’t say a word when we gave him the orders, but the next day he was gone when we went down to his hut. We were sure he had backed out, but two days later he reappeared. He said he had been to the family farm in Gudbrandsdalen. A few days later we received reports from our people up there. One brother had been found in the cowshed, the other in the barn. The parents on the sitting-room floor.

‘My God,’ Harry said. ‘The man must have been out of his mind.’

‘Probably. We all were. It was war. Besides, we never talked about it, not then and not since. You shouldn’t either . . .’

‘Of course not. Where does he live?’

‘Here in Oslo. Holmenkollen, I think.’

‘And his name is?’

‘Fauke. Sindre Fauke.’

‘Great. I’ll contact him. Thank you, herr Juul.’

On the TV screen, there was a very close close-up of Poppe sending a tearful greeting home. Harry secured the mobile phone in the waist-band of his tracksuit bottoms, hitched them up and strode off to the weights room.

Shania Twain remained unimpressed.

39
Gentlemen’s Outfitter, Hegdehaugsveien. 2 March 2000.

‘W
OOL QUALITY, SUPER
110,’
THE SHOP ASSISTANT SAID
, holding the suit jacket for the old man.‘The best. Light and hard-wearing.’