Satellite People - [8]

Fredrik Schelderup struck me as being very unlike his father. When I asked what else he had done in his life so far, he quipped: ‘As little as possible, while I wait to inherit from my father.’ He went on to say that he had taken his university entrance exam and then studied a bit at the business school and university, but that he infinitely preferred the life of a student at the weekend to that during the week. He had stopped studying without any qualifications and had subsequently never been able to decide what he wanted to do. And fortunately, there was no real need to, either. While waiting for the anticipated substantial inheritance from his father, he had lived well on a more modest inheritance from his mother, and some income from various short-term jobs. Fredrik Schelderup jokingly remarked that he had loved driving ever since he was a boy – fast cars and beautiful women. In an even jollier aside, he added that when a beautiful woman asked him what his star sign was, he normally replied ‘the dollar sign’ – and then set about proving it. Otherwise his daily consumption was generally modest, ‘certainly on weekdays’. He was waiting to fulfil his wish of seeing more of ‘the world and its bars’ until he got his inheritance.

When asked about how much he expected to inherit, Fredrik Schelderup was almost serious for a moment. He replied that he hoped he would get a third of his father’s fortune, and it was reported in the papers that his total wealth was valued at more than 100 million. But he did not dare assume that he would get any more than the 200,000 kroner he had claim to as one of the heirs. He had been looking forward to receiving his inheritance for many years, but was in no way in any kind of financial straits and had not asked his father for money for years – knowing that should he ask, he was unlikely to get anything other than sarcasm in return.

Over the years, Magdalon Schelderup had repeatedly expressed his disappointment in his eldest son’s lack of initiative and business acumen. The son was no longer hurt by this and had, on a couple of occasions, responded by expressing his disappointment in his father’s treatment of his first two wives and their sons. The conversation had usually stopped there.

Fredrik Schelderup was again earnest for a moment when I asked about his dead mother. She had been four years younger than Magdalon Schelderup and had been a great beauty with many admirers, when, at the age of twenty-three, she said yes to his proposal of marriage. More than once in her later years she had told her son that Magdalon Schelderup had married her simply because it was the only way he could get her into bed – which apparently became an obsession from the first time they met. She had won over Magdalon Schelderup, but in doing so had lost herself, she often said with increasing bitterness.

Fredrik was the only child from a deeply unhappy marriage, which ended in a bitter divorce just before the war. Fredrik’s mother was a Christian and had very much enjoyed being ‘the Queen of Gulleråsen’ at Schelderup Hall. She was strongly opposed to divorce, but her husband had found someone else and eventually threw his first wife out of the house, ‘almost physically’. Fredrik had stayed with his father for several years after the divorce, ‘for reasons of pure ease’, but had then suddenly found it ‘more comfortable’ to move into his own flat once he had finished school. His mother did not suffer financially, but she never really recovered from the divorce. Nicotine and alcohol had both contributed to a permanent deterioration in her health, and she died of liver failure at the age of forty-nine.

With regard to his relationship with other members of the family, Fredrik Schelderup now declared that he liked his father’s second wife marginally more than the third, but that he had never had much contact with either of them. In terms of the rest of the family, he tended generally to have the warmest feelings for his eleven-year-younger half-brother. They had grown closer when his brother entered puberty and had himself become the child of divorced parents. But any contact was still sporadic. They were very different, and his brother had ‘been sensible enough to realize that I was not a good role model’ when he was about to come of age. Fredrik Schelderup’s relationship with his twenty-year-younger half-sister had always been distant. However, he did say that for someone her age, she appeared to be a remarkably determined and enterprising young lady.

A hint of seriousness returned once again to Fredrik Schelderup’s otherwise jocular expression when he said this. And when he had left the room, I sat and ruminated on whether I had also seen a hint of respect or fear when I looked in his eye.

VII

Leonard Schelderup was an intense, gum-chewing man of twenty-seven, about half a head shorter than me. He appeared to glide into the room, with the classic light step and lithe body of a long-distance runner. He had managed to regain some composure by the time he came in for questioning, two hours after the murder, but was clearly still deeply affected by the drama in the dining room. He admitted as much himself and started by apologizing for his confused behaviour. He then added that the day’s events really were quite extraordinary, and that he felt particularly exposed.