I gave her my driving licence, and she studied it carefully. ‘It doesn’t say anything about an insurance company here,’ she said suspiciously.
I took out one of the visiting cards I’d got a printer friend to run me off before he went bust and set fire to the whole shooting match. If she was pernickety enough to ring to check the number on the card, she’d get no further than my answerphone, which neutrally recorded everything that came in, from funeral dirges to doomsday trumpets. In that case, I hoped she would understand that the Nemesis Insurance Company was one of the smallest and that the telephone operator was at lunch just then.
But she was not that pernickety. She handed both driving licence and visiting card back to me, swung open the door and muttered faintly, ‘I hope it won’t take too long. I’m off sick.’
I went into the hall, waited till she had closed the door behind us and followed her into what turned out to be a kitchen looking out onto the back, where a February pigeon sat pecking forlornly at the window frame in the hope of finding some insects that had survived the winter.
She had been sitting at the kitchen table with a magazine open at the crossword and a half-empty cup of coffee beside it. I pulled out a wicker chair, sat down and had a quick look round the room before taking out my notebook and assuming an official air.
The room had a sort of half-hearted feminine look about it, with clear signs that it had been furnished by two different people with utterly different tastes. One of them had a preference for large flowery patterns in the curtains, the other for a kind of simple, almost cryptic style, represented in the wallpaper.
‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ she asked, and when I nodded, I had the pleasure of seeing her stretch to take a mug from one of the shelves in the kitchen cupboard. Under her dressing gown she was wearing tight-fitting teenage-style pyjama trousers in pink cotton with small flowers, and she had stuffed her bare feet into deep red slippers with big pompoms on them, borrowed from some diva she had forgotten to return them to. Unless, that is, it was Gro Anita they belonged to. I wasn’t in any particular doubt about which of them liked flowers and pompoms, and which had the simpler style.
She poured coffee from a pale yellow flask, pushed the magazine out of the way and looked at me inquiringly.
I nodded towards the half-finished crossword. ‘That’s just what a sudden death is like. A long row of unanswered questions and a form you have to fill in bit-by-bit, down and across, until – if you’re lucky and have a good dictionary – you’ve completed it. Filled out what actually happened.’
She shifted uneasily. She felt her forehead with the back of her hand as though to emphasise the fact that she had a temperature. Her lips were dry and cracked with white blotches against the darker flesh.
‘And there are still some clues we haven’t found answers to,’ I went on.
She fluttered her eyelashes, not from any attempt to make an impression but rather like someone suddenly emerging into very harsh daylight. Yet still she said nothing.
‘As I was saying… not to beat about the bush… You were the one who found him, weren’t you?’
She nodded, shifting her gaze to the window. The pigeon was no longer there, as if it had sensed danger. The same snowflakes fell steadily over the city as though from a never-ending supply, but did not stick, because the thermometer was still a fraction above zero.
‘Can you tell me what happened?’
When she eventually spoke it was so softly that I had to lower my head to hear what she said. ‘I don’t know what had gone on in there… I just – found him.’
‘Yes, I see, but… You knew he was there, did you?’
‘Yes, we’d been told that the room was taken till two o’clock.’
‘Was that normal?’
Her gaze shifted again. ‘Y-yes… It often happens that guests need the rooms a bit longer.’
‘Yes, but I meant… you’d seen the judge before, hadn’t you?’
‘Yes, he… they said he often had important meetings there… conferences.’
‘Mm.’ I looked reassuringly at her.
‘So… I’d seen him there before.’
‘And… did you see who he had these – meetings with before?’
‘Er, sometimes… Yes.’
‘Was it – men?’
She did not answer.
‘Women?’
She nodded.
‘Different women?’
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Er, maybe.’
‘Young women?’
She pursed her lips.
‘Very young?’
A further nod. ‘I’ll say!’
‘Oh?’
‘No, I just meant, you wouldn’t have caught me doing it! Even if they paid me a fortune!’
‘Yes, that’s probably what most people would think.’
‘The old pig! He got no more than he -’ She stopped herself abruptly, horrified at what she had just been about to say.
I took out the newspaper cutting showing a picture of Torild Skagestøl, put it on the kitchen table and pushed it over to her. ‘This girl here, was she one of them?’
She glanced quickly at the picture, almost as though she was afraid of being recognised. She nodded faintly. Then she leaned closer and had a good look at it before nodding with much greater conviction. ‘Hair a bit different maybe, and a much more brazen look on her face but – yes…’ She looked me straight in the eye. ‘I’m sure it’s her!’
I leaned forwards. ‘Sure it was her the day we’re talking about as well?’
She looked uncertain. ‘Er, I think so, but… I didn’t see her so clearly that day, but – it was nearly always her! Quite a few times. I’m sure of it now… When she passed me, well, us, in the corridor, she just looked straight at us with the most brazen look you can imagine – as if we, as if we didn’t get what she was up to in there, as if we didn’t know what she was!’
I felt a strange buzz, a mixture of satisfaction and fear. Satisfaction at what I’d already figured out; fear at what it could only imply. ‘But… OK. Let’s go back to the day we’re talking about – last Friday, right?’
She confirmed it with a faint nod.
‘Tell me how it was that you… that you found him.’
She pushed her large glasses back up the bridge of her nose but hadn’t got many words out before they’d slipped back down. ‘It was her I saw first… She was… she seemed in a real hurry because on her way to the lift she was still tucking her blouse into her slacks, but when she – saw me…’
‘Yes?’
‘I was just coming out of a room at the end of the corridor, and… when she saw me, she turned straight back as though…’ She searched for the right expression. ‘Well, she didn’t want to be seen, in a way. Then she disappeared round the corner where she must definitely have taken the stairs instead.’
‘Did her behaviour strike you as unusual?’
‘Yes, but not in that way…’
‘Was that when you went into their room?’
‘No, no, it wasn’t two o’clock yet, and they had the room…’ She lost the thread of what she was saying.
‘I see. And then?’
‘Then – I did the other rooms.’
‘What time was it when you got to Brandt’s room, then?’
‘I didn’t look at my watch – twenty past two, something like that, according to what the police said. At any rate it was twenty-five past two when they were telephoned from reception.’
‘Tell me what happened.’
‘Nothing happened. When I went to the room I knocked and waited, the way we’re always supposed to. But he could have gone while I was doing one of the other rooms, so… when there was no reply I let myself in with the key.’ She put her hand over her mouth as though the memory of what she had seen there was so strong that she involuntarily had to go through her own physical reactions again.
‘First it was so quiet that I was sure he’d left. But there was a smell, a smell I couldn’t identify… and when I got right into the room, there he lay, on the bed, in a really contorted position, wearing just, just… I had to be sick, so I dashed into the loo, but nothing came up. It was just my stomach turning, my whole diaphragm heaving, it hurt so. I think that’s what made me sick now I come to think of it.’