The Catalyst Killing - [2]

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.