I couldn’t believe my ears. He had thrown step one right back in my face by stating that we should give the show a miss; my ploy had been blown. And now he was running step two, what Inbau, Reid and Buckley call ‘sympathising with the suspect by normalising actions’. And the most incredible thing was that even though I knew exactly what Greve was doing, it did build up, this feeling I had read so much about: the suspect’s desire to throw in his cards. I almost felt like laughing out loud.
‘I don’t quite understand what you mean now, Clas.’ Although I was trying to appear relaxed, I could hear that my voice had a metallic timbre and my thoughts were wading through syrup. I was unable to mobilise a counter-attack before the next question came.
‘Money is not actually my motivation, Roger. But if you like, we can try to increase the salary. A third of more…’
… is more. He had taken over the interview completely now and gone straight from step two to step seven: Present the alternative. In this case, give the suspect an alternative motivation for confessing. The execution was perfect. Of course he could have brought my family into play, said something about how proud my deceased parents or my wife would be if they heard how I had pushed up the salary, our commission, my bonus. But Clas Greve knew that would be going too far, of course he knew that. I had quite simply met my match.
‘OK, Clas,’ I heard myself say. ‘I give in. It is just as you say.’
Greve leaned back in his chair again. He had won, and now he was letting his breath out and smiling. Not with a sense of triumph, just happy that it was over. Used to winning, I noted down on the sheet I already knew I would throw away afterwards.
The strangest part about it was that it didn’t feel like a defeat, but a relief. Yes, I felt nothing less than invigorated.
‘Nevertheless, the client requires concrete information,’ I said. ‘Would you mind if we went on?’
Clas Greve closed his eyes, placed the tips of his fingers against each other and shook his head.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Then I would like you to tell me about your life.’
I made notes as Clas Greve told his story. He had grown up as the youngest of three. In Rotterdam. It was a rough seaport, but his family were among the privileged, his father had a top job with Philips. Clas and his two sisters had learned Norwegian during the long summers with their grandparents in a chalet in Son, on the Oslo fjord. He had had a strained relationship with his father, who considered the youngest child spoilt and lacking in discipline.
‘He was right,’ Greve smiled. ‘I was used to achieving good results at school and on the sports track without doing any work. By the time I was around sixteen everything bored me, and I began to visit “shady areas”. They’re not hard to find in Rotterdam. I had no friends there and didn’t make any new ones, either. But I did have money. So, systematically, I began to try out everything that was forbidden: alcohol, hash, prostitution, minor break-ins and bit by bit harder drugs. At home my father believed I had taken up boxing and that was why I returned with a bloated face, a runny nose and bloodshot eyes. I was spending more and more time in these places where people let me stay and above all left me in peace. I don’t know if I cared for this new life of mine. Those around me saw me as a weirdo, a lonely sixteen-year-old they couldn’t make out. And it was precisely this reaction that I liked. Gradually my lifestyle began to show in my school results, but I didn’t care. Eventually my father woke up. And perhaps I thought I finally had what I had always wanted: his attention. He spoke to me in calm, serious tones; I yelled back. Sometimes I could see he was on the point of losing control. I loved it. He sent me to my grandparents in Oslo where I did my last two years of school. How did you get on with your father, Roger?’
I jotted down three words with ‘self’. Self-assured. Self-deprecating. And Self-aware.
‘We didn’t speak much,’ I said. ‘We were quite different.’
‘Were? So he’s dead?’
‘My parents died in a road accident.’
‘What did he do?’
‘Diplomatic corps. The British Embassy. He met my mother in Oslo.’
Greve tilted his head and studied me. ‘Do you miss him?’
‘No. Is your father alive?’
‘Doubt it.’
‘Doubt it?’
Clas Greve took a deep breath and pressed his palms together. ‘He went missing when I was eighteen. He didn’t come home for dinner. At work they said he had left at six as usual. My mother rang the police. They immediately went into action as this was a time when left-wing terrorist groups were kidnapping rich business people in Europe. There hadn’t been any accidents on the motorway; no one by the name of Bernhard Greve had been taken to hospital. He wasn’t on any passenger lists and the car had not been registered anywhere. He was never found.’
‘What do you believe happened?’
‘I don’t believe anything. He may have driven to Germany, stayed at a motel under a false name, unable to shoot himself. So instead he could have pushed on in the middle of the night, come across a black lake in some forest and driven in. Or maybe he was kidnapped in the car park outside Philips, two men with pistols on the back seat. Put up a fight, got a bullet through his head. The car with Dad in was then driven to a breaker’s yard the same night, crushed into a metal pancake and cut up into tiny bits. Or perhaps he’s sitting somewhere with umbrella-adorned cocktail in one hand and call girl in the other.’
I tried to detect a reaction in Greve’s face, in his voice. Nothing. Either he had considered the thought too often, or else he was just a stony-hearted bastard. I didn’t know which I preferred.
‘You’re eighteen years old and living in Oslo,’ I said. ‘Your father’s gone missing. You’re a young man with problems. What do you do?’
‘I finished school with top grades and applied to join the Dutch Royal Marines.’
‘Commandos. The macho elite stuff, eh?’
‘Definitely.’
‘The sort where one in a hundred get in.’
‘That kind of thing. I was selected to take part in the preliminary tests where they spend a month systematically trying to break you down. And afterwards – if you survive – four years building you up.’
‘Sounds like something I’ve seen in films.’
‘Believe me, Roger, you won’t have seen this in a film.’
I looked at him. I believed him.
‘Later I joined the counter-terrorism unit BBE in Dorn. I was there for eight years. Got to see the whole world. Suriname, the Dutch West Indies, Indonesia, Afghanistan. Winter exercises in Harstad and Voss. I was taken prisoner and tortured during an anti-drugs campaign in Suriname.’
‘Sounds exotic. But you kept your mouth shut?’
Clas Greve smiled. ‘Shut? I chatted away like an old fishwife. Cocaine barons don’t play at interrogation.’
I leaned forward. ‘Really? What did they do?’
Greve observed me thoughtfully with a raised eyebrow before answering. ‘I don’t think you really want to know, Roger.’
I was a little disappointed, but nodded and sat back.
‘So your comrades were picked off or something like that?’
‘No. When they attacked the positions I had given away, of course everything had been moved on. I spent two months in a cellar living on rotten fruit and water infested with mosquito eggs. When the BBE carried me out I weighed forty-five kilos.’
I looked at him. Tried to imagine how they had tortured him. How he had taken it. And what the forty-five-kilo variant of Clas Greve had looked like. Different, of course. But not that much, not really.