‘That’s not impossible.’
‘I never wear any stuff like that myself… I mean, black, it seems kinky to me.’
I didn’t comment on that aspect. ‘Was there anything in the room to indicate what had been going on there?’
‘Well, it looked as though there’d been a party. They’d helped themselves to beer from the mini-bar, and there were pillows – on the floor, one of the chairs had been knocked over, and in the bathroom…’
‘Yes?’
‘Just behind the toilet bowl, I saw it when I was bending over to be sick, there was a bottle lying on the floor, an empty – bottle of tablets.’
‘What did you do with it?’
She looked at me wide-eyed. ‘Do with it? I told the police, of course!’
‘Was there anything on the label?’
‘Do you really think I looked at it? It was all I could do to stand up. What I needed was – well…’
I drained my coffee. ‘Was there anything else in the room you particularly noticed?’
‘Nothing except what he’d… He’d tried to write something on the wall…’
‘What? He’d tried to write something?’
‘At first I thought it was blood that he’d smeared around, but then… There was no blood apart from that, and I… then I realised it was lipstick.’
She looked at me with an air of intense unease. ‘He’d painted himself, worse than the worst…’ She ran her fingers round her lips as though to show what she meant.
‘So he’d tried to write something, with the lipstick?’
‘Yes.’
‘What was it?’
‘First it looked just like a few squiggles, but later… it was a letter.’
‘A letter! Which one?’
‘A big – “T”.’
Eighteen
SOURCES ARE, if anything, more important in my line than they are for the press and protected by just as strict a code of confidentiality. Maybe that was why I had so many useful contacts in the dailies.
The editorial world was a labyrinth, and a well-lit one, not so much because it was supposed to be difficult to find one’s way through it but to make room for as many people as possible in the currently available space.
I found Laila Mongstad in a little cubicle at the far end, with half a window facing the back of the Social Sciences block in Foss-winckels Street and the Catholic school in the next building. It was almost four years now since, at a surprisingly late stage in her career, she had been poached from the paper’s more radical cousin in Christian Michelsens Street and had long confirmed her reputation as a such a first-class reporter on social affairs that the paper had already been in the dock twice to answer libel charges following some of her revelations.
Perhaps it was all the dirt she spent her time digging up that had made her previously generous smile slightly frayed at the edges; or perhaps it was just age claiming its due. She’d kept up quite a pace over a career of thirty or forty years in newspapers, and, despite the fact that her blue-grey eyes were still full of energy and dynamism, I quickly calculated that she’d certainly turned sixty since we’d last had something special going. And we’d never really got any further than that.
The smile she gave me betrayed nothing. Her eggshell-blue silk blouse emphasised her large breasts, but I noted that she had done up the lower buttons of her red cardigan, most likely to camouflage the size of her waist above the tight-fitting dark-blue slacks.
‘How are you?’ I began cautiously.
‘Is this a friendly visit, or is it work?’ she answered, swivelling her chair away from the computer keyboard she was using.
‘Both.’
‘In that case, you’d better sit down.’
‘Thanks. Which shall we start with?’
She gave a crooked smile. ‘Which’ll take longer?’
‘I’m sure you know about – that girl they’ve found up on Fanafjell…’
‘Holger’s daughter. It’s dreadful. But…’
‘She’d been missing for a whole week, and I… I was hired two days ago to try and find her.’
‘I see. You got there too late?’
‘I wasn’t even close – but I did find something out.’
‘Oh?’
‘One of the places I learned she’d hung out in a good deal is an amusement arcade called Jimmy’s.’
She pulled a face. ‘Jimmy’s…’
‘Know the place?’
She pulled out a drawer in her desk. ‘How did you find out that she hung out there?’
‘One of her girlfriends said so.’
‘It doesn’t necessarily mean anything, of course, but…’
She had taken a large beige envelope out of the drawer. Now she opened it and tipped about twenty black-and-white enlargements onto the desk. ‘One of our photographers took these from a parked car at the beginning of January.’
She pushed four of the pictures over to me.
I looked at them. They showed the entrance to Jimmy’s. A young girl was coming out. In the next picture she was walking along the pavement, as the dark shadow of a moving car came into the picture from the right. In the third picture she stood half leaning over, looking into the car, and in the fourth she was climbing into the passenger seat beside the driver.
The car’s number plate had been touched up and was quite legible. I glanced up at Lalla Mongstad. ‘Have you checked out who the car owner is?’
She nodded.
‘And -?’
She looked around and leaned so close that I caught a hint of her perfume, a fresh, sap-like scent. ‘A not entirely unknown local politician… You know who Hallstein Grindheim is, don’t you?’
‘The Christian People’s Party man?’
‘Unfortunately, you can’t see the driver.’
‘You mean you don’t know who the driver was?’
‘No.’
I looked at the other pictures. ‘Are there more like these?’
She leafed through a few pictures before taking three out and pushing them over to me.
One of them was almost identical to the first one I’d seen. It showed another young girl coming out of Jimmy’s. The next one showed her walking along the pavement in another street. I had to look closer at a couple of the hoardings to identify where it was. The third showed her going through the main entrance of the same hotel I’d visited myself a few hours before.
‘And then?’ I asked.
She shrugged her shoulders. ‘There’s a limit to how far we can follow this up, but… a rendezvous in one of the rooms?’ She handed me a fourth picture. ‘Here she’s on her way out two hours later.’
‘Where did she go then?’
‘To the bus station and then took the last bus home.’
‘But your paper hasn’t written about this yet, as far as I recall.’
‘No. At the moment we’re just gathering background material. When we come out with this stuff we must have cast-iron evidence to back it up.’
‘Excellent. What more do you know? I take it your people have been poking around at Jimmy’s too?’
‘You know who owns the place?’
I hesitated. ‘No, but since you say it like that… it’s Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, isn’t it?’
‘No, but you’re on the right track. The initials are the same.’
‘Birger Bjelland?’
‘Mm.’
‘Does this mean, in other words, that something can be pinned on the guy at last?’
She pouted sceptically. ‘Mm. Maybe we should put it like this… A long time ago he showed that he has as many lives as a cat. We can possibly shorten his life account by one if this really nails him.’
‘What about Hallstein Grindheim? Have you confronted him with the pictures?’
‘Not yet. But if we can only get him full frontal, he’s going to find it on the front page!’