Satellite People - [59]

He answered the remaining routine questions clearly and concisely. Leonard Schelderup had been frightened by the threatening telephone call, but had not said who he thought it might be. It looked as though he had had another visitor earlier in the evening, but he had not wanted to say who it was or what they had discussed. There had been cups and plates on the table when he arrived, and they were still there when he left.

In answer to my final question regarding his own alibi, the man opposite me said that his wife and perhaps his two older children would be able to verify that he came home at ten to midnight.

It was only then that I fully understood the absurdity of the situation. But I could also safely say that the man I was talking to had left the scene of the crime before the fateful shot was fired. I sympathized with his grief and pain. But the idea that he would be welcomed home that evening by his blissfully unknowing wife and children, who had not the faintest idea of his double life and betrayal, was hard to swallow. So I left what remained of my cake, thanked him for the information without shaking his hand, and hurried back out onto Karl Johan. It was nearly one o’clock and almost time for my next appointment.

IV

Widow Maja Karstensen was older and greyer than I had imagined. She must have been closer to eighty than seventy and used two sticks to walk the few steps across the floor of her tiny flat. But her smile was youthful and the coffee was ready on the table. When I asked her if she had known Arild Bratberg for a long time, she replied in a voice that was both friendly and helpful.

‘Yes, I would say so. Arild was born in the flat next door, and I visited him and his mother the very same evening. She was my best friend, Mrs Bratberg. You see, I couldn’t have any more children of my own, the doctors had told me so three years earlier when I barely survived the birth of my second son. So it was a real joy to have a little one on the stairs again.’

I nodded and let her take the time she needed to continue. Her progress was steady, if not fast.

‘Arild was a bit of surprise. His brother and sister were about fifteen years older and his father was over fifty. He died just a few years after Arild was born, so things were often not easy for Arild and his mother. Arild was small and puny as a boy, never the strongest or the smartest. But he was as kind and helpful as the day was long. And he seemed to be doing all right for himself just before and during the war. He had got himself a job as a messenger boy down at the Schelderup office in town and seemed quite optimistic about the future. He had a bicycle and dreamt of buying his own car one day. But then…’

She suddenly floundered and fell silent, but found her voice again after drinking some coffee.

‘But then there was that terrible murder on Liberation Day. There were so many awful things going on at the time, and so many good men found their lives turned upside down by some terrible thing that happened one day during the war. Arild was one of those whose lives changed most, and in the most inexplicable way. But it was the word of a rich man from the best part of town against that of a poor lad from the east end. So Mrs Bratberg and I quickly realized how the court case would end.’

I took the liberty of commenting that the version of events that Arild Bratberg wanted the court to believe was rather wild. She let out a sad sigh.

‘Yes, indeed, it was a bizarre story. Even I doubted it until more recently, and there were times over the years when he really did seem slightly mad. But then, as time passed, I too became more certain that it did not happen in the way it was told in court. Arild had his clear moments when he was sober. And he always repeated that the court judgement from 1945 was wrong. He used to say, “I might well be mad now, but I wasn’t back then.”’

Maja Karstensen was not the quickest of people and perhaps never had been. But I suspected that for most of her life she had been one of the kindest. Her voice was still gentle when she continued.

‘It was quite obvious that Arild did lose his mind. When he was released from prison he came back home and his mother looked after him as best she could. She had little time for anything else. He was never really himself again. At any time of the day or night he would suddenly start to rant and rave about the murder; he said so many strange things, even when he had not touched a drop. His mother left the flat to him before she died in 1955. She thought that his brother and sister could manage fine on their own without it. But they didn’t like that at all, did they? So he was left completely on his own after the death of his mother.’

Maja Karstensen took another short pause. Suddenly her gaze fled out of the window, over the back fence. In a strange way, this grey-haired woman reminded me in that moment of the national football player I had met earlier in the day.

‘I gave my own sons to Norway and the sea, and neither Norway nor the sea gave them back. The elder one was on a boat that was torpedoed, and drowned somewhere near Shetland on 5 April 1944. I was informed of it in a letter that I received one day after the war, when I still hoped that he would come back. My younger son was on a ship that sank in the Pacific, and after seven days at sea in a lifeboat he finally managed to swim ashore to Australia. He wrote to me that he would never dare venture out onto the water again. So he stayed there, on the other side of the world, and is still there today, as far as I know. I still send letters to his old address at Christmas and Easter, but the last reply I got was for Christmas in 1953. So after my friend died, I ended up looking after her son. It was not always easy, believe me. For many years he was unbearable when he was drunk, and very depressed when he wasn’t.’