20 March: Changed the will under considerable duress. A debt must always be paid, after all, no matter how loathsome the creditor.
25 March: After several sleepless nights on the edge of my grave, I have changed my will again. Everything shall be sacrificed on the altar of my greatest sin!
30 March: Pressure increasing from all quarters. Could bump into J, D and N at any moment. All three are threatening and erratic. The evil spirits from my past are crowding me into my grave. Will let the will stand as it is and hope that it will bring happiness to the one I have failed the most. In desperation, have called a final meeting on Thursday evening, despite the obvious risks.
With this entry, the diary stopped abruptly. All the remaining pages were blank.
Harald Olesen was shot during a meeting in his home on the evening of 4 April, which was the first Thursday after 30 March. But I did not know if he had arranged this meeting with D, J, N or O, or who any of them were. None of the initials D, J, N or O fitted the names of anyone in the building. Unless ‘J’ quite simply stood for ‘Jensen’.
I went into Bjørn Erik Svendsen and asked if he had ever heard Harald Olesen mention the initials D, J, N or O, or come across them in any other context. He shook his head without any hesitation. In pure desperation, I read a couple of the entries out loud to him, but this did not help to reveal the identity of the people in question. However, the colour did still drain from Bjørn Erik Svendsen’s face and he told me that in all his conversations with Harald Olesen, he had never heard mention of the words ‘fear’ and ‘terror’. It was therefore a shock to hear just how scared the old Resistance hero had been in the last months of his life.
I ordered Bjørn Erik Svendsen not to say a word about the existence of the diary, something he swore to. I then asked him to remain in town and to contact me immediately should he remember anything that might be of importance regarding the identity of D, J, N or O – or the investigation in general. He assured me that he would, and asked me twice not to mention that he knew about the diary.
A minute later, I saw Bjørn Erik Svendsen almost running along the pavement below the window. I realized how profoundly the murder would affect his life, and even more so, the other residents of 25 Krebs’ Street. It was strange to think how very different the situation would have been for them, as it would for me, if Harald Olesen had been allowed to die from his illness a few days or weeks later.
I sat there alone leafing backwards and forwards through the diary for an hour, but was none the wiser. I desperately missed Patricia’s voice and was several times about to drive to her home unannounced. But when I later got into the car, I headed not towards Erling Skjalgsson’s Street, but towards the hospital. There was a man waiting there who had been given a message to say that I would come today whom no one dared believe would live another day.
IV
Sadly, his wife had been right. There was not much left of Anton Hansen in 1968, compared with the handsome, dark-haired groom in the photograph from 1928. Forty years later, the same person was a worn and grey bag of bones lying in a white hospital bed. I would have guessed his age to be no less than seventy-five and his weight well under nine stone, despite the fact that he was still at least five foot ten. His hair was grey, his skin pallid, his breathing laboured and his mouth toothless. He had one tube in his left arm and another up his nose, but as he was constantly coughing, they were constantly in danger of falling out.
In other words, Anton Hansen the caretaker appeared to be precisely what he was: a man who had lived a hard life and who was now dying as a result. His eyes lit up when he saw me, but his face and body both remained heavy and, somehow, disillusioned. He gave an almost imperceptible nod in welcome. He lifted his hand from the bed in greeting, but his handshake was without energy or will. There seemed to be something strangely deformed about his hands. It took a couple of minutes before I realized that not only did he lack teeth, he also lacked nails.
‘Detective Inspector Kolbjørn Kristiansen. I am here, as I am sure you understand, in connection with the unsolved murder of your neighbour Harald Olesen.’
He nodded again. His voice was weak but friendly.
‘I thought I was going to die myself when I heard about the murder. Harald Olesen is one of the people I have admired most in this world, and I never imagined that I would outlive him. I had hoped that he would come to my funeral and still have many years before him.’
He gasped for breath and coughed at the same time, but continued remarkably quickly.
‘During the war, everyone who knew his identity worried that he would be shot any day. But now, so many years later… it came as a shock, and I cannot imagine who would want to kill him. Not anymore.’
His head fell back on the pillow. I discreetly stood up and moved closer to the bed so he could see me without lifting his head. He nodded gratefully.
‘I admired Harald Olesen during the war, of course, but it was actually later that I fully understood just how strong he was. Harald Olesen was a man of action, someone who could always distinguish what was important and what was not, who always looked to the future. He managed to carry on, even though he must have seen things far worse than I did during the war.’
He coughed again, this time so violently that I looked around for a nurse, but then he carried on speaking.
‘My problem was that I remembered everything so clearly, and then you get caught up in what happened and it is impossible to move on – especially when the experiences are as powerful as those I carried with me from the war.’
It seemed to me that Caretaker Anton Hansen was intellectually fitter than he was physically. But now I was impatient to know more about what happened during the war and about his neighbours, before it was too late.
‘It must have been very peculiar for you and Harald Olesen, as former Resistance fighters, to have a convicted NS member as a neighbour.’
A small smile slid over Anton Hansen’s face, but then quickly gave way to a grimace.
‘Well, yes, but Konrad Jensen has not harmed a fly since the end of the war. I never asked Harald how he felt about having a former Nazi as a neighbour, but it was not a problem for me. In a strange way, it felt as though Konrad and I shared a fate. We were both small, weak men who tried to dance with the big, strong men like Harald Olesen during the war. And we paid for it dearly in later years, each in our own way.’
‘Can you remember any particular events or people from the occupation that may be of significance?’
He heaved a heavy sigh – and then had to gasp for air.
‘My problem is that I remember too much. So much happened during those years, and most of it was secret, so I am not sure what might or might not be important. I remember the happy moments: Liberation Day and the return of the royal family. And I remember the first refugees who we hid in our cellar. There were four of them in 1942 to 1943, and all made it over the border to Sweden. While they were with us, I will never forget that tension. If the Germans had come while they were there, both my wife and I would have been shot along with our guests. We lived together for a few days, with the threat of death hanging over us. The youngest of these guests was a petrified lad of only sixteen or seventeen who spoke both Norwegian and German. He came back ten years later with his wife and child to give us gifts in thanks for our help. That is one of my best memories from after the war.’
Anton Hansen smiled for a moment, until he was once again overwhelmed by a coughing fit.
‘And then there were the three last ones… and they were not quite so lucky.’
I moved even closer into his range of vision and indicated impatiently that he should continue.
‘A young couple with a baby who came to us in February 1944. Dark-haired, attractive and well dressed, but terrified by the danger hanging over them. They scarcely dared to let one another or the child out of sight for a moment, and I heard them crying and whispering together in a foreign language every night. They spoke Norwegian, but their intonation was odd and they used lots of strange words, so I realized that they came from another country and had somehow found themselves behind enemy lines in Norway.’