For an instant, however, he wondered if he shouldn’t carry on all the same, up towards Briskeby and from there along Briskebyveien in order to go up Industrigata to Majorstua and to the police station in Jacob Aalls gate. ‘After all, I can report it now,’ he thought. ‘Then it is over and done with. Certainly I might run into some unpleasantness, because I haven’t told them before, but everybody is bound to understand, if they just try to understand, that it can happen to the best of people.’ For an instant he was so strongly tempted by the idea of carrying on up towards Briskeby, along Briskebyveien, right up to Majorstua police station, that he felt positively relieved by the very possibility of it. But no sooner had he felt this sense of relief coursing through his body than he realised that these were in any case just idle thoughts, which could cheer him up true enough, momentarily, but which he was never going to act on, and he decided once and for all to stop toying with such hypothetical ideas, which only led him deeper and deeper into the mire, or so he put it to himself, whilst he turned and walked back down Niels Juels gate towards Skillebekk again. He headed back home, anxious to see if anything had happened. He managed to stop himself looking over at the window in the other apartment building, while he himself was down on the street, in front of the building where he lived, with the other building on the other side of the street, and waited until he had unlocked the door at the front entrance and had gone up the stairs to his own apartment and let himself in there and gone over to the window. No. It was the same.
‘Pull yourself together,’ he told himself urgently. ‘You have been gone for half an hour on Christmas morning, to be exact from 12.45 p.m. to 1.15 p.m.; how do you imagine that anything could have happened at the window in such a short space of time? Hope, well, yes, but it’s a faint hope. Something will happen over there sometime, but it needn’t happen today. Calm down. Think about something else.’ But he could think of nothing else.
‘I have to talk to someone,’ he thought. ‘I must call someone.’ He thought about his friends, which of them he should call, and while he was thinking about it, he remembered that tomorrow, on Boxing Day, he was of course supposed to go to Nina and Bernt Halvorsen’s place for dinner. ‘I can wait till then,’ he thought. ‘I’ll talk to Bernt about it. He is a doctor after all.’ He was invited for seven o’clock, and if he arrived an hour earlier, then he and Bernt would have plenty of time to talk, while Nina was in the kitchen getting the food ready, he thought. Bernt most likely only has to see to the wine, uncork it and put it beside the heater to bring it to the right temperature, and while Bernt Halvorsen saw to that, he could explain. The thought of this calmed him. All he had to do was to stick it out for just over a day, and then he could explain. He’d manage that. He could bear it for that long. He went into the kitchen and had a look at the lutefisk he had in the fridge. Took it out and felt it. It was nice and firm, you can keep lutefisk in the fridge for a whole day, as long as you buy prime quality fish, he thought, and put the fish back in the fridge again. He wasn’t going to dine until evening. In the meantime he was going to read a good book, whatever he meant by that, he thought. And along with the book he’d have a drink. With dinner: beer and aquavit. With the coffee: cognac.
And that was the way it turned out, you might say. Professor Andersen woke up the next morning with a bad hangover. It was still snowing. The roar of snowploughs could be heard everywhere, as well as the grating sound they made as they scraped the snow off the road surface on Drammensveien. The curtains in the window opposite were still drawn. The rectangular curtains which covered the whole window, in an extremely compact manner. Professor Andersen had repeatedly gone across and looked over at the other side of the street, yesterday Christmas Day, and last night, and he did so frequently this day, too. He was looking forward to the dinner party at Nina and Bernt Halvorsen’s. As early as five in the afternoon he left his apartment, because he suddenly decided that he wanted to walk all the way to Sagene.
He walked up Niels Juels gate to Riddervolds Plass, after that up Camilla Colletts vei and Josefines gate to Homansbyen and Bislet. From Bislet: up Dalsbergstien to Ullevålsveien and St Hanshaugen, then steeply down Waldemar Thranes gate to Alexander Kiellands Plass. From there he walked along Maridalsveien up to Vøien Bridge, and up there, in a small house beside the River Aker whose grassy banks were now covered in snow, lived the Halvorsens, the married couple, both doctors, who had invited him to dinner. He walked along calmly at first, slowly, in fact, through the driving snow and the Yuletide darkness towards Riddervolds Plass and Bislet, because he had plenty of time and did not want to arrive too early; after all, he intended to arrive at six o’clock for a dinner he was invited to at seven. But even before he was at Bislet he noticed that his pace had quickened, because he had a burning desire to carry out his plan, and so, when he was at St Hanshaugen and about to start on the descent to Alexander Kiellands Plass, he felt good and warm and longed to reach his destination, so that he might give vent to the thoughts burning inside him. Because he knew why he had put himself in this situation. He couldn’t have acted otherwise. He had witnessed a murder, and hadn’t reported it. No, indeed, he had not. He didn’t have the slightest inclination to do so, and he knew why. The murder had happened. That was the issue, something irreversible had happened, something he had witnessed. He couldn’t warn them about something irreversible. If he had witnessed a burglary, had he, for instance, seen there were thieves in that same apartment, who were carrying out a television and a stereo, then he wouldn’t have hesitated to call the police. Because then it would have been urgent. Likewise if there had been a fire. If he had seen smoke seeping out of the window, or smelt it, he would, of course, have called the fire brigade without a moment’s hesitation. And, well, if he had witnessed a vicious assault down on the street, and it had looked as though one of them was killing the other, then he would have run over to the phone and called the police. And while he waited for the police, he would have considered intervening himself in order to stop the abuse, if he hadn’t been too cowardly, that is. Well, let’s say that he had been too cowardly, and one person had battered the other to death before the police arrived, while he stood and watched it, then he would it is true have had dreadful pangs of conscience to contend with, but he could have lived with that, yes, he damn well could live with that, he thought defiantly, and, coward or not, he would certainly have called the police. There was no doubt about that, because that phone call could have prevented something irreversible happening. But he had been a witness to something irreversible, and there was nothing he could do. He couldn’t make things better by calling to notify them that it had happened. The murder, which he’d witnessed, was an accomplished fact. ‘I can’t tell them about this. The only outcome would be the murderer’s arrest.’ And the murderer might well be caught, but not on account of him, Professor Andersen, intervening and notifying them that the man had committed a murder. The idea was distasteful to him.