‘But the matter of the attack is more urgent, and it really is not possible to get much more out of this mysterious document. The answer must be there staring us in the face right now, but very annoyingly, I can’t see it. The dates are interesting enough in themselves.’
I nodded and said that the middle one was the same as on the photograph. She nodded impatiently.
‘Yes, obviously, any child could see that. But that’s not all that is of interest; 17 May has been our national day since 1814, and on 7 June we mark our independence from Sweden in 1905. These Nazis have certainly chosen to meet on symbolic days. But 8 August means nothing to me, other than that it is only a matter of days ago, and was after Falko Reinhardt had come back and Marie Morgenstierne had been murdered.’
‘The document says nothing really about any of the people,’ I said.
Patricia sighed and gave me a curt nod.
‘It seems reasonable to assume that A and D, who wanted to take action, are Messieurs Eggen and Heidenberg, and that they have tried to persuade the fourth man in the picture to join them. But what more do we know about him? That he is probably slightly younger and more physically fit than they are. That he is not wearing a wedding ring on his hand, but does have a family of some kind. That could still be any one of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of men in eastern Norway. And Falko has for some reason used the abbreviation SP for this person.’
‘And the letters on the page do not refer to any known names. It seems to me rather that he has just used the first four letters of the alphabet?’
Patricia shook her head in irritation.
‘Yes and no. Henry Alfred Lien talks about A, B and D. Where is C then?’
‘Maybe he is C himself?’ I suggested.
Patricia was not convinced by this either.
‘Possibly, but if he was referring to himself you would have thought he would use A or D. It seems strange to use C about yourself, particularly if you never otherwise use the letter…’
Patricia’s focus switched intently between the pages and the photograph.
‘Wait a minute! Their professions. Of course: A is for architect or Heidenberg, D is for director Eggen… What do you think B stands for, then?’
Suddenly it all fell into place within three seconds.
First, I saw sparks in Patricia’s eyes.
Then she screamed.
And then she asked me in a terrified whisper: ‘What time is it?’
I looked at Patricia, and wondered if the pressure of the past few days had resulted in some kind of nervous breakdown. Patricia was wearing a gold watch on her left arm, but she did not check it; she sat as if paralysed from the neck down. Only her eyes were alive, her eyes and her voice.
‘What is the time?’
When she repeated the question, the whisper was even quieter and the fear even more tangible.
I looked at my watch and told her that it was twenty-five past four.
That was evidently all that was needed for Patricia to come back to life. She suddenly leaned forward across the table in an almost aggressive manner.
‘Then run for your life and country! You have only five minutes before he shoots Trond Bratten!’
I was the one who was now paralysed for a few seconds. Patricia leaned forward and was even more forceful.
‘Run! I would run with you if I could. The address is 66 Thomas Heftye’s Street by Frogner Square. He’ll fire from a window. Look up and see if you can see an open window. But for God’s sake, man, run now!’
I ran. As I leaped to my feet, I asked who was going to shoot from the window.
Patricia almost screamed the answer – and pointed wildly at the door.
The pieces all fell into place in my head within a couple of seconds. Then I ran as fast as I could ever remember having run. I ran out of the house, down the road towards Frogner Square.
X
The murderer stood by the window of 66 Thomas Heftye’s Street with a gun in his hand, and looked down over the mass of people below.
He glanced at his watch. It was twenty-five past four.
Only five minutes to go until the man in the window would shoot the Labour Party leader on the stage down there in Frogner Square. He felt remarkably calm, all the same.
B had never met Trond Bratten, but had still hated and scorned the man ever since the war. It rankled with him endlessly that a country bumpkin and small farmer’s son who did not have even basic school exams could become minister of finance, and then promptly fail to take the advice of the entire banking sector. And what was even more pathetic was that the small, thin man had to hide behind his wife in any given situation because he lacked any great oratory skills, but still insisted that he should be prime minister, rather than any of the better-qualified men in the country. To the murderer, Bratten was the symbol of a new era where ambitious upstarts and speculators were succeeding in taking power over the country, without either the education or the cultural heritage and wisdom that coming from a good family gave.
Ever since he was a child, the man at the window had felt immense contempt for people who did not recognize and accept their place in society. And he had hated Trond Bratten as good as all his adult life – both for his disproportionate ambition, and for every word he uttered as a politician. It all sounded like polished Marxism.
But this was not just a matter of personal contempt and political hate. Trond Bratten’s death was now necessary in order to secure the future of the country. The murderer had thought a lot about it over the years, and then more recently discussed it at length with his late father’s friends, Christian Magnus Eggen and Frans Heidenberg. All three had hated and scorned Trond Bratten for many years, but they were now starting to fear him. They all agreed that the government’s days were numbered. If Trond Bratten was allowed to live, he would become Norway’s prime minister within the next couple of years.
This was in itself a terrible thought, but also a tragedy because of the consequences it would have for the nation. A split between the right-wing parties and the Labour Party’s ascent to power could herald a new and long period in government for the party: at the very least, as long as the last one. The financial cost of the party’s taxes and charges would be catastrophic for business. But what was worse was that Trond Bratten, with his ridiculous hero status from the war, could now become the prime minister who would abandon the country’s independence and guide it into a new union. In a matter of decades, this would leave the country open to mass immigration from other countries all over the world. And it would be a national catastrophe. The murderer had himself been in the USA and seen the results of the increasing numbers of black and yellow faces on the streets. Criminality had mushroomed, and no white man could feel safe on the streets of any American city. The murderer did not want Oslo to look like that when he was an old man.
Fortunately there was only one man who stood in the way. Trond Bratten reigned supreme within his own ranks. His deputy was young and inexperienced. If Bratten fell, the Labour Party would no longer have a leader to unite them and would perhaps even be thrown into a bitter leadership struggle. The best that one could hope for was that this, combined with the debate on the union, would spell the beginning of the end for the party.
The man in the window had in his youth been fully prepared to kill people. He had been a sniper and an extremely diligent soldier. Already in his late teens, he had pushed his mental boundary and abandoned any blocks to taking human life. During the Second World War he had never been in combat, and the next great war that he had anticipated, with a mixture of fear and glee, had never happened. So he ended his military career. But he had continued to carry with him an immense curiosity as to how it would feel to kill a man. For many years, it had seemed unlikely that this would ever happen. But he had always carried it within himself. If he was not born to be a murderer, then he certainly had been trained and prepared to become one from his youth.