Satellite People - [39]

‘Is that Detective Inspector Kristiansen? If it is, please can you come immediately? There has been another murder.’

The voice was trembling, and yet impressively controlled and clear. I recognized it immediately as one of the voices I had heard at Schelderup Hall. It took a couple of seconds more before I realized it belonged to Magdalon Schelderup’s former wife, Ingrid. She spoke quickly and was remarkably informative.

‘I am in Skøyen, in my son’s flat. I came to see him this morning, but someone has been here before me. Leonard is lying on the floor with a bullet wound to his head and has obviously been killed. If you come, you can see for yourself!’

The choice of words was rather odd, but her voice was still impressively clear for a woman who had just found her only son murdered. I vaguely recalled Patricia’s words about the hard and strong satellite people involved in this case. Then I mumbled my condolences and asked her to stay where she was with the door locked until I got there. She promised to do this, but added that it was too late to save her son’s life or to catch the murderer.

So Tuesday, 13 May turned into one of the very few days when my breakfast was left untouched on the kitchen table. It took me less than thirty seconds from the time I put down the phone to when I slammed the front door shut behind me.

The drive to Skøyen, on the other hand, felt incredibly long. I remembered what a great experience it had been to watch Leonard Schelderup sail across the finishing line with rare majesty, his long fair hair flowing, to win gold in the Norwegian Championships at Bislett the year before. I also remembered only too well his frightened face at the reading of the will, and his terrified voice on the telephone last night. Now that Leonard Schelderup had in one fell move gone from murder suspect to murder victim, my sympathy welled up.

Alone in the car, I cursed several times the fact that I had not come out to see him last night. For the second time in three days a Schelderup had phoned me and for the second time he had died before I could speak to him. My only defence was that I had offered to station a policeman outside and he had said no. This time I had even ordered a constable to go there several hours later. But the facts of the matter were still brutal: Leonard Schelderup had telephoned me yesterday evening to say that he was frightened and this morning he had been shot and killed.

The investigation seemed to be more complicated than ever. I had never truly believed that Leonard Schelderup had murdered his father, but no more than a day ago he had been the only one of the ten who had stood out as a natural suspect, in addition to Synnøve Jensen. And now that he had become a murder victim himself, it felt as though the mystery was getting deeper, despite the fall in the number of possible suspects. Apart from Synnøve Jensen, I could not pick out any one of the nine remaining as a more or less likely double murderer than the rest.

The first person I met at the scene of the crime was the constable who had been standing guard. He immediately came forward when he saw me on the pavement outside. He was a down-to-earth, good police officer who gave a down-to-earth and good report, according to which he had driven here as soon as he had been asked last night and had been standing guard, with a clear view to both sides of the building, since ten to three in the morning. There had been no sign of life in either of the flats in the building at that point. No one had come or gone from either of them, until an older lady, who it turned out was the deceased’s mother, had rung the bell at around twenty past seven. The light in the neighbour’s flat had come on at ten past seven, but there was still no sign of life in Schelderup’s flat by that time.

Thus there was only one clear conclusion, and that was that if Leonard Schelderup had been murdered during the night, the murderer must have done it and left the building before ten to three in the morning.

Ingrid Schelderup stood patiently by the window in her son’s flat while I talked to the constable. She waited to unlock the door until I rang the bell, but then took only a matter of seconds.

The first thing I saw when I stepped into the flat was Ingrid Schelderup’s taut face. The second was her pale, shaking right hand, which was pointing to the floor. And the third was a revolver on the floor where she was pointing. The gun was lying on the carpet just inside the door. With a quick look I could confirm that it was an old Swedish-produced 7.5mm calibre Nagant revolver.

And so one of the small mysteries was solved. The revolver that had disappeared from Magdalon Schelderup’s cabinet had been found again. But that left another, deeper mystery. And that was who had taken it from Magdalon Schelderup’s gun collection in Gulleråsen a day or two earlier, presumably with the intention of aiming it at his younger son?

Leonard Schelderup himself was nowhere to be seen in the hallway. He was lying on the floor in the living room beside an armchair that was facing the television. His body was intact, clean and whole, apart from a bullet wound in his forehead from which the blood had poured freely. One look was enough to confirm that any hope of life was long gone. The flow of blood from the wound had already started to congeal. I quickly estimated that Leonard Schelderup had died in the early hours of the morning, at the latest, and perhaps even late in the previous evening.