The minute Henrik Nordstrøm had left, Professor Andersen opened the door to the dining room, went through it and into the living room, where he stationed himself behind the curtain. He saw Henrik Nordstrøm come out of the main door and hurry towards his own entrance, unlock it and disappear in there. ‘Uh-huh, another engagement!’ exclaimed Professor Andersen to himself. He remained standing there for a while in order to see if a person really did come and ring the doorbell at the entrance of the building where Henrik Nordstrøm had his apartment. That did not happen. However, Henrik Nordstrøm himself came out this same entrance a little while later and walked over to his car, which was parked outside, and drove off. Professor Andersen checked the time. Quarter past nine. Too late to phone Hammerfest? No. He called directory enquiries and asked for the number belonging to the name which Henrik Nordstrøm had said was the present name of his former wife. He called the number and a woman answered the telephone. She confirmed that she was the person bearing the name which Professor Andersen enquired about. And so he put down the receiver. He had his confirmation, and he didn’t like it.
For now we are back where we started, and Professor Andersen is in a great fix. He is standing in his Italian suit looking at the telephone receiver, which he has just put back down on top of the telephone again, after getting the confirmation he didn’t wish to get. That woman, who from his window on the night before Christmas Day he had seen Henrik Nordstrøm strangle in his apartment, was not his wife, but a strange woman. A woman who has not been reported missing and who probably cannot be connected to Henrik Nordstrøm in any particular way once she is found, or eventually reported missing. If, that is, she ever is. Professor Andersen was standing out in the hall where the telephone stood and was sunk deep in his own thoughts. He veritably sank down under the weight of them. Now he had returned to the starting point, and that felt worse than being stuck there around New Year’s Eve. Everything that happened to Professor Andersen, from this evening until the murderer rang his doorbell the following Wednesday, appeared to take place in a kind of fog. Professor Andersen felt ill, so ill that in the morning he called the university and requested to be relieved of his duties that week. Afterwards, he went to a doctor, not Bernt Halvorsen, but another one, whom he had consulted previously, and he was granted fourteen days’ sick leave. Strain. He sent notice of this sick leave to the university straight away. He was really unwell, his head ached, he saw spots before his eyes and he felt queasy all the time, but didn’t throw up. He put on his pyjamas and went straight to bed. But he couldn’t manage to lie still, so he got up, put on his dressing gown and wandered around his apartment, from room to room. This day, and the next day, and the day after that. While he brooded. And waited until next Wednesday. He had no idea what to do. His belief, or delusion, that Henrik Nordstrøm had murdered his own wife meant that he had thought the net was closing in on him, and that it could only be a matter of time before he was exposed, and that had reassured him to such an extent that he had managed to live an approximately normal life during the two months which had passed since he had witnessed the murder from his window. That had turned him into a kind of observer. Perhaps one could say that out of primitive curiosity he had kept an eye on the apartment across the street, and on its inhabitant, of late. A glance now and then, to catch sight of the man whose destiny would soon catch up with him. But now he was back at square one. The murderer and himself, he, who had witnessed the murder. And who hadn’t reported what he had witnessed, and who therefore was the reason why Henrik Nordstrøm walked around freely, without destiny catching up with him. And next Wednesday the murderer would ring his doorbell, so they could go to the Bjerke Racecourse together to see the murderer’s horse running in its first race ever. ‘I should have reported him,’ he mumbled. ‘Had I known what this would lead to, I would have reported him. If for no other reason than to know what really happened. Who was the woman I saw in the window on the evening before Christmas Day. Who is now dead. Why did he kill her? And what has he done with the body? And why has no one reported her missing? Indeed, I might be tempted to get dressed again and go to Majorstua Police Station right away, just to solve the riddle.’ The thought raised his spirits, until it struck him yet again that this was just a flight of fancy, which gave him only a moment’s comfort, and that he wouldn’t seriously consider doing it. Even though he could now say he regretted not having reported the murder on the evening before Christmas Eve immediately after it had happened, when he had indeed gone to the telephone and lifted the receiver in order to call, it turned out — in spite of the sadness he now felt when he imagined this situation, when he lifted the receiver and put it back down again shortly after, without ringing the number which could have liberated him from what would later cause him such trouble and which now troubled him more than ever — when the thought of reporting it now arose, he was just as powerless as before. It had been and still was impossible for him to report Henrik Nordstrøm, even now, after meeting him. ‘And I rushed headlong from Trondheim because I was afraid I would lose him. Good God! At least I wouldn’t do that again,’ he exclaimed. ‘Wouldn’t you?’ he added hastily, ‘are you quite certain about that?’ he heard himself thinking, in a sarcastic tone. ‘You’ve said that you don’t know why you did that, haven’t you? And if you don’t know why you did it, how can you be so sure that you wouldn’t do it again? Oh, leave off, leave off!’ He walked round his apartment in his pyjamas, with a dressing gown tied at the waist to keep him warm. Now and then he felt far too hot, and he loosened the belt and let his dressing gown hang open. ‘But,’ he thought, ‘my not reporting him is based on a single supposition, let that be clear. And that is the fact that it was a chance murder, not planned, but committed in desperation, out of a sense of injury, anger. If it had been a murder committed for the pleasure of it I wouldn’t have hesitated in reporting it. Likewise, if it had been planned in cold blood. Oh no,’ he said in dismay, ‘I wouldn’t have reported a premeditated murder. That’s true,’ he said quietly, ‘I don’t want to pretend. But a murder for pleasure, that I would have reported. But how could I know what kind of murder it was!’ he then exclaimed. ‘I only saw her being strangled; that was all I saw. But I have assumed that it happened in a frenzy, in blind fury, and thus blindly. Therefore I couldn’t report him. I couldn’t stomach doing it. Stomach?’ he interrupted himself. ‘Stomach, you say! Well, brain then. Consciousness. I couldn’t bear to be the one to intervene so that justice could be done, as I assumed he was so appalled by his actions that I didn’t want to prolong his suffering: better to relieve it instead, if that were possible. He didn’t really mean to murder her. It was the act of a man who had lost his head. I might well have done it. You don’t say,’ he put in scornfully. ‘You, who have just admitted that you couldn’t have reported him even if you had known that it was premeditated. Could it have been you, then, too? Oh no,’ he answered, ‘I couldn’t have planned a murder in cold blood. But I feel sorry for the person who has done it. It’s unbearable to imagine oneself in his stead if such a dreadful deed, an atrocity, had been fully premeditated, yes, calculated. Therefore I want him to go free, escape, yes, maybe even forget the whole thing; yes, I do indeed, at any rate I can’t assist in his arrest. But why then make an exception with regard to a confirmed murderer, my dear Pål Andersen?’ thought Professor Andersen, splitting hairs. ‘Because an unrepentant killer is dangerous. He can do it again. Ah but,’ Professor Andersen interrupted himself exultantly, ‘then you mean that someone who has planned a murder and afterwards carried it out in cold blood, without the least little bit of compassion for the person he has murdered or, even worse, is going to murder, isn’t dangerous? Well, I must say!’ he added. ‘Yes, indeed, you must say,’ Professor Andersen mimicked, ‘but it is a fact that a premeditated murder is an isolated action carried out to solve a problem that must be solved, looked at from the point of view of the person who performs it, and which otherwise wouldn’t have been solvable, and it is extremely doubtful, yes, statistically impossible, I should imagine, that one and the same person finds himself, or herself, twice in what is for them such an irresolvable situation, which may, in fact, be solved in this way. But an unrepentant killer murders because he likes to kill, and as long as there is someone to kill, then it’s possible he’ll do it again. Therefore, he must be reported so that he can be rendered harmless. Oh, I can’t bear to think about it any more; no matter what I think, there is always something wrong. I only hope that he can get away, away from me at any rate, or vice versa,’ he thought. ‘Oh, I must get rid of him,’ he thought, all of a sudden. ‘Now, now, I didn’t mean it in that way,’ he added, and almost had to laugh. But the thought made him feel like laughing, and he had to repeat it. ‘I must get rid of him,’ he thought, and almost had to laugh again. ‘Indeed, not in that way though,’ he added, and now he really had to laugh. He laughed so much he couldn’t stop, and started coughing. He laughed and coughed and between the outbreaks of laughing and coughing he thought, ‘I call that a morbid sense of humour,’ and the hiccups of laughter broke out again, so that he walked around his apartment bent double, from room to room, in pyjamas, with a dressing gown over. He wasn’t barefoot: he was in his socks, because he didn’t want to catch influenza, on top of it all. Professor Andersen never wore pyjamas, for that matter, except when he was ill, as he now was, though he lacked the peace of mind to lie quietly in bed. He had just one pair of pyjamas, the ones he had been given many years ago by his long-departed mother, and which he hadn’t worn much, as Professor Andersen was rarely ill. He walked through the rooms in his apartment, at his wits’ end. He looked at the books on the bookshelves lining the walls of his study. He was pale from the laughing fit, which he now regarded with great concern, as it was an expression of emotional agitation by a man standing on the brink of something or other. All those conflicts he had read about, all those men under duress, at crossroads, forced to make a choice, metres and metres of books on the shelves dealt with just that, but these could not help him at all now. ‘Oh, but I have learnt nothing,’ he sighed, ‘because there is nothing to learn; I have all these books in my head, as I pointed out to the man who is behind all these troubles, but not literally speaking, after all. If that were actually true, I couldn’t have opened a single cupboard in this apartment without old skeletons falling out, and that isn’t how it is, after all. I can prove that, just by opening a cupboard,’ he thought. ‘But don’t do it,’ he added, ‘not now, in the state you are in.’