The Human Flies - [2]

Meanwhile, the neighbours out on the landing could only open the door to Harald Olesen’s flat once the caretaker’s wife had arrived with the key. After some discussion, they decided not to cross the threshold until PC Eriksen arrived half an hour later. Their fears of a shootout soon proved to be unfounded. There was no sign of a weapon in the flat, or any form of life. Harald Olesen was lying in the middle of the sitting-room floor with a bullet wound on the left side of his chest. The bullet had gone straight through him and was lodged in the wall. Otherwise the flat was in every way the same, as far as the caretaker’s wife could remember, as it had been the last time she was there – with no sign of the murderer or murder weapon.

The very fact that the gun was missing of course disproved any theories of suicide. However, there was no evidence that another living person had been in the flat, or any indication of how the murderer might have left the scene of the crime. Harald Olesen lived in an ordinary two-bedroom flat with a bathroom and kitchen, but no balcony. The thirty-foot drop down to the pavement made the windows an unlikely escape route. Any ideas of fire ropes or mountaineering equipment being used to escape floundered on the fact that the windows were closed from the inside.

In other words, the front door remained the only feasible option. If the murderer had managed to get in, he or she could surely have got out the same way. The door had a snib lock, and the safety chain was not on. The most pressing question therefore was, how had the murderer managed to leave the flat in those few seconds between the shot being heard and the neighbours arriving at the scene? And the second question was, how on earth had the murderer left the building? The second floor was the top floor and the only way down was either the stairs or the lift. If the murderer had taken the stairs, he or she would have met the other neighbours on their way up. The first two neighbours at the scene gave each other an alibi. Any suspicion of a conspiracy between them was groundless given that there was no murder weapon and insufficient time before the other residents appeared. They were all agreed that the lift had been standing on the ground floor both immediately before and after the shot rang out. The lift was empty when the caretaker’s wife hurried past and when the wheelchair-bound resident on the ground floor opened the door a few minutes later. And it was impossible to imagine that anyone had succeeded in using the lift to sneak past the neighbours on their way up and then managed to get past the caretaker’s wife, who was by the entrance.

From half past eleven all available police officers helped to search the flats and building from top to bottom, without finding the weapon or anything else that might help to clear up the murder mystery. The caretaker’s wife had been given four hours’ pay to clean the victim’s flat the previous weekend and had used her time diligently. With the exception of her own fingerprints, the only ones found in the flat were those of Harald Olesen.

Meanwhile, I pondered the possibility that the murderer had actually never been in the flat, but had fired the shot from another building. This theory was, however, flawed, as it would appear that Harald Olesen had been sitting or standing in front of a solid stone wall without a window when the shot was fired. And if that did not make things difficult enough, all the windows in the room were still intact.

So, apart from the presence of a dead man with a bullet wound in his chest and the bullet lodged in the wall behind him, there was no sign of drama in the flat. Harald Olesen was lying on the floor in the sitting room by a coffee table that was set for two. He had drunk from one cup and left his fingerprints on it, whereas the cup on the other side of the table was untouched. It would appear that Harald Olesen had been expecting someone for coffee and cake, but there was nothing to say who had visited him – or whether the invited guest was the murderer.

The remains of a meal of meatballs were still standing on the cooker and by the sink. There was milk, bread and cheese in the fridge for tomorrow morning’s breakfast. The radio on the kitchen table was plugged in. A Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra record lay ready on the turntable. Death had obviously come suddenly to Flat 3A in 25 Krebs’ Street.

By one o’clock on the morning of 5 April 1968, it was clear to me that there was nothing more to be gained from staying at the scene of the crime. I left one constable on guard on the second floor and another on the street outside the building. I asked the pathologist to send me a report as soon as possible, and requested copies from the census records and police records for all the residents of 25 Krebs’ Street. Then I sent everyone there to bed, but asked that they stay at home in the morning to be available for questioning.

It was already clear to me on the night of the murder that the murderer was in all likelihood one of the deceased’s neighbours. There was nothing to indicate so far that anyone else had been in the building that evening. Fortunately, I had no idea how difficult it was going to be to find out which flat the murderer had come from.