Satellite People - [2]

Back home in my flat in Hegdehaugen, I found the latest article about Magdalon Schelderup in the pile of newspapers. It had been published only three days before. Yet another front page of the Aftenposten evening edition was filled with his photograph, this time under the headline ‘King of Gulleråsen’. It concluded by saying that if the richest man in Gulleråsen was not already one of the ten richest men in Norway, then he very soon would be. The value of his property and assets was estimated at over 100 million kroner. Only months before his seventieth birthday, the property magnate and stock market king was at the peak of his career. With increasing regularity, financial experts speculated that he was one of the twenty most powerful men in Norway, though it was now many years since he had retired from his career as a conservative politician.

Over the years, newspapers and magazines had used unbelievable quantities of ink to write about Magdalon Schelderup. To begin with, they wrote about his contributions as a Resistance fighter and politician during and immediately after the war. There was then a rash of speculative and far less enthusiastic articles about the contact his family businesses might have had with the occupying forces during the war, and why a few years later he stepped back from an apparently promising political career. Later articles about his growing wealth and business acumen were frequently alternated with other more critical articles. These discussed his business methods, as well as the breakdown of his first two marriages and the financial settlements that they incurred. The interest in his turbulent private life appeared to have diminished following some further articles in the early 1950s when he married his third wife – this time a woman twenty-five years his junior. In recent years, however, there had been more and more articles that questioned the manner in which he kept shop. Former competitors and employees more or less queued up to condemn his methods and he had regularly been taken to court. With little success. Magdalon Schelderup cared not a hoot what the newspapers and magazines said, and with the aid of some very good sharpshooting lawyers, he was never sentenced in any court.

And it was this dauntless and apparently unassailable magnate who had telephoned me today to say that someone close to him planned to kill him next week.

Thus 10 May 1969 became one of the very few Saturdays when I yearned with all my heart for it to be Monday morning and the start of a new working week. I did not know then that the case would develop very quickly and dramatically in the meantime.

DAY TWO: Ten Living and One Dead

I

The following morning, 11 May 1969, started like every other Sunday in my life. I caught up with my lack of sleep from the previous week and did not eat breakfast until it was nearly lunch. The first few hours of the afternoon were spent reading the neglected papers from the week gone by. I even managed to read the first four chapters of the book of the week, which was Jens Bjørneboe’s Moment of Freedom.

When the telephone rang at twenty-five past five, I had just stepped out of the shower. I made absolutely no attempt to answer it quickly. The caller was remarkably persistent, however, and the phone continued to ring until I picked it up. I immediately understood that it was serious.

The telephone call was of course for ‘Detective Inspector Kolbjørn Kristiansen’. It was, as I had guessed, from the main police station in Møller Street. And, to my horror, it concerned Magdalon Schelderup. Only minutes before, they had received a telephone message that he had died over the course of an early supper at his home – in the presence of ten witnesses.

On the basis of what had been reported by the constables at the scene, it was presumed to be murder, but which of the witnesses present had committed the crime was ‘to put it mildly, unclear’. The officer on duty at the police station had been informed that Schelderup himself had contacted me the day before. As none of the other detectives were available, the duty officer felt it appropriate to ask whether I might be able to carry out an initial investigation and question the witnesses at the scene of the crime.

I did not need to be asked twice, and within a few minutes was speeding towards Gulleråsen.

II

When I got there at ten to six, there was no trace of drama outside the three-storey Gulleråsen mansion where Magdalon Schelderup had both his home and head office. Schelderup had lived in style, and he had lived in safety. The house sat atop a small hill in the middle of a fenced garden, and it was a good 200 yards to the nearest neighbour. Anyone who wished to enter without being seen would have to make their way across a rather large open space. They would also have to find a way through or over the high, spiked wooden fence that surrounded the entire property, with a single opening for the heavy gate that led into the driveway.

I mused that it was the sort of house one finds in an Agatha Christie novel. It was only later on in the day that I discovered it was known as ‘Schelderup Hall’ by the neighbours.