The Catalyst Killing (K2 and Patricia series Book 3) Read online

  Hans Olav Lahlum

  THE

  CATALYST

  KILLING

  Translated from the Norwegian by

  Kari Dickson

  PAN BOOKS

  To Mina –

  who represents hope for the future

  and a new generation of politically active

  idealists . . .

  Contents

  DAY ONE The woman on the Lijord Line

  DAY TWO Three parents, four students – and one slightly problematic witness

  DAY THREE More answers, more questions – and more suspects

  DAY FOUR An interesting trip to the mountains – and another running woman

  DAY FIVE A running man and a torn photograph

  DAY SIX By the cliff – and near boiling point

  DAY SEVEN The countdown and the explosion

  DAY EIGHT The triumph and the tragedy

  Afterword

  CHAMELEON PEOPLE

  DAY ONE

  The woman on the Lijord Line

  I

  I saw her for the first time, rather suddenly and unexpectedly, at nine minutes past ten in the evening of Wednesday, 5 August 1970.

  Later that evening, I would find out the young woman’s name. But over the next seven dramatic days I would continue, in my mind, to call her ‘the woman on the Lijord Line’. Had I understood the reason for her behaviour there and then, it might not only have saved her life, but also the lives of several other people.

  I had finished my evening shift a few minutes earlier with a fairly routine callout to a hotel by Smestad. If the manager there had been somewhat tense before the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, he had definitely become a touch paranoid since. He reported a new potential terrorist threat at the hotel roughly every other month. This time he had called about a guest whose behaviour was ‘suspiciously secretive’, one of the manager’s favourite expressions. The guest in question was a man who was possibly no more than thirty, though it was hard to say for certain because of his full beard and apparently suspiciously dark sunglasses. He was well dressed, spoke perfect Norwegian and had been politeness itself when he asked for a room with a balcony on the first floor. He had, however, not reserved a room in advance and did not give a postal address. The guest had said that he was not sure how long he would stay, but paid in cash for the first ten days at least. He did not want his room to be cleaned, and asked for a breakfast tray to be left in the hall outside his room every morning at nine o’clock. As long as the empty tray was put back out in the hall again, one could safely assume he was still there. And this had been the case for the past six days, but no member of staff had seen any other sign of life from the guest.

  I dutifully put my ear to the wall in the hallway for a minute or two, without hearing anything suspicious, of course. I ascertained that there was no evidence of criminal activity, and said that there could be many explanations for the guest’s undeniably unusual behaviour. Then I promised to check the name he had given – Frank Rekkedal – in the police records, and asked them to contact us should there be any more grounds for concern.

  For purely practical reasons – the axle on my police car had broken earlier in the day – I had taken a local train to Smestad. So, at nine minutes past ten, I boarded the train back into the city centre. It was a very quiet summer’s evening in Smestad. I had been the only passenger waiting on the platform.

  It was just as I sat down that I saw her for the first time. She emerged very suddenly from the darkness on the road leading up the platform. And she was moving fast, extremely fast.

  My first thought was that she must be a top athlete, as I could not remember having seen a woman run so fast before. Then I imagined that I might soon see a man with an axe or a scythe running after her. But there was no sign of any pursuer, even though I could see a good twenty to thirty yards behind her. In fact, there was no one else to be seen out there. And yet the woman ran even faster, despite her extremely tight jeans, hurtling towards the last door of the last carriage. It dawned on me that she might in fact be a madwoman as, despite her speed, she was running in a very odd way. Twice she hopped to the left at full speed, and once to the right.

  Despite her tremendous exertion, she did not manage to reach the train in time. The doors slid shut right in front of her. It felt as though the entire carriage shuddered when she ran into them. For a couple of seconds, we stared at each other through the glass windows in the doors. I could see that she had long blonde hair and guessed that she was in her mid-twenties and slightly taller than average. It was, however, her face that struck me. It was a frozen mask of fear. The blue eyes that stared into mine were as wide as could be.

  The doors did nothing to stop the young woman’s desperation. She hammered on them with her fists in despair and then pointed a trembling finger at me, or at something behind me.

  I turned around automatically but could see no one else in the carriage. It was only once the train had left Smestad station that I realized she had been pointing at the emergency cord on the wall.

  I sat and thought about this strange encounter with the woman on the Lijord Line all the way back into town. The trains were still running every twenty minutes, so it could surely not have been such a disaster that she missed it. By the time I got off at Nationaltheatret, I had dismissed the whole incident, having convinced myself that she was obviously a few sandwiches short of a picnic. I did not regret that I had lacked the sense to use the emergency brake, and thought to myself it was just as well as I would probably never see her again.

  But I did see her again – that very same evening, in the very same place. At five to eleven, to be precise, only moments after I had jumped out of a police car borrowed from Smestad police station.

  In my somewhat feeble defence, I did immediately realize what had happened when I got a telephone call from Holmenkollen at a quarter to eleven to say that the train that left Smestad station at twenty-nine minutes past ten had run over a young woman on the tracks.

  When I returned, the woman on the Lijord Line lay immobile and lifeless on the tracks, in sharp contrast to the energy and sheer speed she had displayed in her mad dash to catch the train when I left Smestad only an hour ago. It was without a doubt the same woman. I recognized her jeans and her fair hair.

  The driver was understandably beside himself. He repeated over and over that the woman had been lying on the tracks when he ran over her, and it had been impossible to see her in the pitch black until the train was almost on top of her, and by then it was technically impossible to stop. It had all happened so fast and been so terrible that he could not say whether she had been alive or not before he hit her. Fortunately, he seemed to calm down a bit when I assured him for the fourth time that no one suspected him of negligence or any other criminal act.

  According to the student ID card she had in her purse along with three ten-kroner notes, a fifty-kroner note, a monthly travel pass and two keys, the woman on the Lijord Line was called Marie Morgenstierne. She studied politics at the University of Oslo and had apparently celebrated her twenty-fifth birthday four weeks earlier. That was all we found that might be of any interest. If she had had a bag with her that evening, it had been lost before her dramatic flight ended on the tracks.

  It struck me immediately that I had heard the name Marie Morgenstierne before. But there and then, I could not recall where or under what circumstances.

  The train had been coming to a halt when it hit her, but her upper body was so badly injured on impact that it was impossible to establish the cause of death at the scene. Her face, however, was intact. She
stared up at me with the same frozen expression of fear that I had seen through the train window scarcely an hour earlier.

  Again I wondered whether she might simply be a disturbed woman who had thrown herself in front of the train, or whether there was something else behind this. And then I promised myself that I would not let this case go until I found out. Fortunately I had no idea how many days this would take, or how complex the search for the truth about the death of the woman on the Lijord Line would prove to be.

  II

  It was with some trepidation that I dialled the home number of my boss at ten minutes past midnight. I knew that he was a night owl who lived on his own, and he had granted me permission to take advantage of this in the event of ‘murder or suspicious circumstances until just after midnight’.

  My boss listened carefully to my brief account. Then, to my relief, he immediately said that given my first-hand impressions of both the victim and the scene of the crime, I was obviously best qualified to head the murder investigation.

  ‘Do you know who Marie Morgenstierne was, by the way?’ he then asked, with great seriousness.

  I had to say no. I still had the uncomfortable feeling that I had heard the name somewhere, but could not remember in what connection.

  ‘Marie Morgenstierne was Falko Reinhardt’s fiancée,’ my boss said, pensively.

  There was silence on the line for a few seconds, before he swiftly added: ‘She was one of the small circle around him, one of the anti-Vietnam activists in the revolutionary youth movement. And she was sleeping in the same bed as Falko Reinhardt on the night that he went missing. She was the first to discover that he had disappeared. A good many people in the police and the public in general, I am sure, would be extremely grateful and impressed if you managed to learn what happened to Falko Reinhardt on that stormy night in Valdres, at the same time as solving the new case. I will have all the papers from summer 1968 sent to your office first thing tomorrow morning.’

  I thanked him and put down the receiver.

  Then I went to bed, but was unable to sleep. In the course of one and a half hours on what I had assumed would be a quiet Wednesday evening, I had been given responsibility not only for a new murder case, but also the division’s strangest and most talked-about missing person case of the past decade.

  Only one thing was clear to me when I finally fell asleep on 5 August 1970 after an unexpectedly dramatic day, and that was who I needed to call before doing anything else when I reached the office the next morning. The telephone number for the disabled professor’s daughter, Patricia Louise I. E. Borchmann, was still written between the emergency numbers for the fire brigade and Accident and Emergency department on my telephone lists, at home and in the office.

  DAY TWO

  Three parents, four students – and one slightly problematic witness

  I

  On the morning of Thursday, 6 August 1970, I woke before seven and realized that I was far too excited to go back to sleep. Following yesterday’s encounter with the woman on the Lijord Line, I felt some of the same obsessive thrill that I had experienced in connection with my first two murder cases. The first investigation had been at as good as a standstill for two days before I met Patricia Louise I. E. Borchmann, following a very timely phone call from her father. I waited no longer than necessary to call her, and felt a surge of relief when, at twenty past seven, I heard her clear, confident voice after only three rings.

  Patricia, of course, did not know about the discovery of a dead woman on the train tracks at Smestad late the previous evening. She listened with increasing interest to my account, and whistled with appreciation when I mentioned the deceased’s name. ‘Falko Reinhardt’s fiancée,’ we both said at the same time. Then we sat in comfortable silence for a few thoughtful moments.

  I broke the silence by adding: ‘Which can hardly be a coincidence.’

  Patricia sniffed so loudly down the telephone that I could just imagine the look of disdain on her face.

  ‘I can most certainly promise you that it is not. You have of course already checked the date on which Falko Reinhardt disappeared?’

  I had to come clean and admit that I unfortunately had not, but tried to excuse myself by saying that surely the date was of no importance here.

  Patricia’s voice held a note of triumph when she replied: ‘Perhaps not. But the fact is that Falko Reinhardt, dead or alive, disappeared into the storm in the Valdres mountains on the night of 5 August 1968. And where I come from, that would certainly not be called a coincidence.’

  I felt an icy shiver down my spine as my pulse started to race. And I heard myself agree that suddenly the date was of the utmost importance, and that it would not be called a coincidence in my workplace either.

  There was nothing to stop Patricia’s morning inspiration and she fired away: ‘Change is the spice of life, even in murder cases. In the 1960s, we dealt with locked-room mysteries and old men. And now at the start of a new decade, you call me about a young woman and an open-space mystery. I must warn you straight away that this could be more difficult terrain. There were only six flats and a total of seven suspects in 25 Krebs Street. And only eleven people sat down to dine at Magdalon Schelderup’s mansion in Gulleråsen. Whereas, in theory, practically anyone could have been at Smestad station last night. Hopefully there will, in practice, be a more limited number of suspects, and I can already give you the names of some of them, having read about Falko Reinhardt’s disappearance at the time. But it is important that we find out as much as possible about what happened in the last hours of Marie Morgenstierne’s life, and who might have been in the area at the time. Find out what she was doing at Smestad yesterday evening and who she met there, and do not delay in requesting any witnesses who might have seen her walking to the station to come forward. Come here for supper at six o’clock this evening and bring with you anything of interest in connection with Marie Morgenstierne’s death and Falko Reinhardt’s disappearance. Will that be possible?’

  It sounded more like an order than a question. I replied immediately that it would.

  ‘Did Marie Morgenstierne throw herself on the tracks, did she fall, or was she pushed?’ I asked.

  I should not have done that. Patricia let out a deep sigh, and answered rather pointedly: ‘No. She was shot.’

  Thus I could confirm with alarmed relief that Patricia was clearly as on the ball as she had been the year before. She waited until I asked for more details, and then replied without hesitation, ‘I would be very surprised if Marie Morgenstierne was not shot only seconds after the train you were on pulled away from the station. And I think it is highly unlikely that she was shot with a hunting rifle of this year’s model. But hopefully you will know more about that when we meet this evening.’

  I replied that I had every hope that I would. Then I put the phone down and left the flat straight away. My mind was already slightly scrambled, but I did have the clarity to realize that I would not be spending much time at home over the next few days.

  II

  At the office I was informed that a routine examination of the scene of the crime and door-to-door enquiries around Smestad had come up with nothing. So I called the national radio station and asked them to make an announcement calling for possible witnesses in Smestad area the evening before. I quickly established that the newspapers had not yet picked up on the death. The headlines were dominated by the new mid-distance running star Arne Kvalheim’s victory in a race at the Bislett Games, and the one hundred or so demonstrators who had set up camp in order to prevent the planned development of a power plant in Mardøla in Møre and Romsdal municipality.

  Having looked through the papers, I sat for a while deep in thought. There were no files of any sort on Marie Morgenstierne in the police records and the census records only contained a single sheet of paper that was of little help. She was simply recorded as living at an address in Frogner, the most desirable part of Oslo.

  It occurred to me that it was r
ather odd that we had heard nothing from her parents or other relatives. When I looked in the telephone directory, I discovered that a Martin Morgenstierne lived at the same address, and he was listed as bank manager. I dialled the number several times and let it ring for a long time, without getting an answer.

  In anticipation of the family getting in touch or of finding any information about Marie Morgenstierne, I threw myself into the rather thick file regarding her fiancé’s disappearance in August 1968. It was exciting stuff and, like Patricia, I found it hard to believe there was no connection between Falko Reinhardt’s disappearance and Marie’s death.

  Falko Reinhardt, Marie Morgenstierne and four other young people from radical student circles at the University of Oslo had travelled together to a cabin in Vestre Slidre in Valdres on Saturday, 3 August 1968. The statements were unanimous in that Falko had been the one who initiated the trip, the purpose of which was to have four uninterrupted days to plan the autumn’s anti-Vietnam demonstrations and other activities, as well as spend time together. The first two days of the trip had passed without incident.

  On Monday, 5 August Falko had left the cabin for a few hours, without saying before or afterwards where he had gone. In the evening a storm had blown up, with driving rain and wind, and the six students had stayed indoors. Some alcohol had been consumed, but as they later remembered it, it was not a lot. The storm had instilled a growing feeling of unease. This had been triggered by an episode earlier in the evening when one of the young women claimed to have seen a face wearing a black eye mask look in at the window. The students had gone out into the storm together, but found no trace of anyone. ‘Incident very odd indeed, but statements credible nonetheless’ was written across the report from the hearings. I noted this down and continued to read with keen interest.

  The real drama in Valdres did not start until two in the morning, when Marie Morgenstierne screamed so loudly that two of the students sleeping in another room woke up.