Lethal Investments (5 page)

He snapped his fingers to find a suitable description. ‘She was . . . herself!’

He was satisfied. ‘She was herself,’ he repeated with a nod.

‘You said she loved clothes, what was her style?’

‘No special style.’

He breathed in. ‘All-rounder. If you get my drift. She could wear anything. One day she looked like a schoolgirl, the next she wiggled her hips like a jailbird’s dream. She . . . I suppose that was what made her a bit special, maybe.’

Jailbird, he jotted that down and looked up. ‘Yes?’

Bregård was gazing into space. No more putting on an act. ‘She was . . . no,’ he broke off. ‘It just sounds so flat in retrospect.’

Frank Frølich waited, but the man had dried up. His profile was pale and somewhat featureless. One of the bristles in his moustache had dislodged itself and was wedged between his lips, which were thin and bloodless.

‘Who did she have most contact with here?’

‘Sonja.’

The man with the moustache swivelled back and gave a resigned sigh. ‘Sonja Hager. She’ll be here soon.’

Frank pulled his boots back on. Taking his time. Tying them up, tight. Stood up. Bregård was still seated and rocking his chair. His mind elsewhere. Frank left. Turned in the doorway. Bregård was absentmindedly rolling a biro between his fingers.

‘If you should think of something that might be helpful,’ the detective said in a friendly tone of voice, ‘get in touch with us.’

He didn’t wait for an answer, just about-faced and went back to the large room with the lift doors.

Lisa Stenersen’s face was smooth and girlish. Nevertheless, now that she was wearing her outdoor clothes, her age came clearly to the fore. She had thrown a padded cloak over her shoulders. That, and two flat, slipper-like shoes, made her look like a revue act. All that was missing was a flower in her hat. She seemed shy now. Glanced nervously at her watch as soon as he appeared. An anxious smile on her face as she fidgeted with a piece of paper.

‘Is this an inconvenient moment?’ he asked, to be obliging.

She blushed. ‘Not at all!’

Ran her eyes down her clothes, bewildered, down the cloak, and her face went even redder.

At that moment the telephone rang. She hurried over to one of the desks in the middle of the room. Grabbed the receiver while Frank sprawled on the sofa immediately behind her. Gazing at the window to study her reflection there.

‘No, I’m afraid he hasn’t been in today,’ she said formally and was about to ring off. But she didn’t get that far.

‘What’s that?’ she exclaimed in a loud falsetto voice, suddenly engaged, pacing up and down, ill at ease as there wasn’t a chair close by. ‘Yes, I see, yes, of course.’

At the start of the conversation the well-rehearsed phrases streamed out in a relatively sincere way. However, the sincerity waned as time passed. And the more she writhed, the clearer it became that she was having difficulty bringing the exchange to a close.

After finally cradling the receiver, still disconcerted, she stood biting a nail and convulsively clenching her other hand. It looked as if she had a problem.

‘You’re going to be late after all,’ Frank remarked.

She released the nail, and chewed her lower lip instead. ‘I suppose I will.’

‘Who were you talking to?’ he asked, feeling no shame at exhibiting his curiosity.

‘Egil Svennebye’s wife. He’s the Marketing Manager here.’

She perched stiffly on the edge of the seat some way from him.

‘She’s worried. It seems he didn’t go home last night. She claims he’s gone missing.’

Eyes downcast, she smiled. Frank Frølich waited for her to look at him. ‘Has she reported it to the police?’

Lisa shrugged her shoulders. ‘I don’t suppose she wants to get the police involved.’

‘But she did sound pretty alarmed, didn’t she?’

‘She was alarmed, yes,’ Lisa confirmed, lost in thought. ‘Perhaps you could talk to her?’

Frank met her eyes. ‘We can’t do much unless she wants us to.’

‘But it might calm her nerves,’ Lisa countered with optimism. The paper she had been fidgeting with was crushed into a tiny ball in one hand. ‘She seemed . . . frightened!’

Frank nodded. ‘Of course we would very much like a chat with her husband as he works here,’ he said reassuringly. ‘So I can pop by his house, can’t I.’

She brightened up a bit.

Frank hastened to change the topic. ‘You used to work with Reidun Rosendal, didn’t you?’

The woman threw a swift glance at her watch. ‘Not so much. Reidun was out a lot, visiting customers. I deal mostly with correspondence and so on.’

‘But you got to know her a little?’

‘Yes, I did.’

She shuddered. Pinched her eyes shut. ‘Was . . . was she tortured?’ she asked, full of apprehension.

Frank looked her in the face. ‘We don’t know.’

Lisa Stenersen folded her hands in her lap, mumbled something with her eyes closed. A gold crucifix hung from a chain against her throat.

‘She was great,’ she said in the end.

‘You mean attractive?’

‘Mm, lovely hair, nice figure . . .’

Frank lifted a finger and tapped his temple.

‘What about here?’

‘Don’t know.’ Lisa Stenersen smiled. ‘Doubt if she was lacking in that department either, but . . . she hid.’

The woman in the padded cloak stared at the floor. ‘There are some people you can never quite fathom, or so it seems!’

With more emotion: ‘Who look at you the way people on TV look at you. What they say is clear enough but you never know if it’s you they are addressing.’

Frank nodded slowly. Lisa Stenersen could have been a member of his mother’s sewing circle. So, it was easy to imagine how Reidun’s words had fallen on stony ground whenever she spoke to her.

He observed her big hair, registered the roll of women’s magazines beside the brown handbag on her desk. The wedding ring that had become buried in the flesh of her ruddy finger. Lisa Stenersen, a representative of the silent army that knows all about meringues, birthday cakes, England’s dismal royal family and how to grow Christmas begonias from cuttings. An age gap of at least thirty years from Reidun Rosendal. A gap that did not necessarily mean much in some cases, but did bear some significance here.

Lisa Stenersen squirmed under his gaze and looked away.

‘That would suggest she wasn’t that stupid,’ he ventured.

She paused.

‘Did she have lots of suitors?’

‘Don’t know. There was no talk of a steady boyfriend at any rate. She and Bregård used to josh around. But that was the tone with her, if you see what I mean. Reidun was probably used to a bit of all sorts, flirting and so on.’

The latter was followed by bashful laughter. She added: ‘There was always a frivolous atmosphere around her.’

‘You two were not very close then?’

‘No, we weren’t.’

‘Do you know who she was closest to here?’

‘Kristin Sommerstedt.’

‘She doesn’t work with us,’ she added with alacrity. ‘But I’m sure you saw her in reception.’

He remembered the receptionist with the birthmark under her lip.

‘I think they had a lot in common,’ she said and peeped at her watch again. ‘Do you think . . . ?’

‘Yes, no problem at all,’ he assured her amiably. ‘That’s fine. We’ll be in contact if there is anything.’

‘I’m happy to go to the police station,’ she declared, grabbing the roll of magazines and her handbag from the desk. Glanced at her watch. ‘It’s just that I . . .’

‘No problem at all,’ Frank repeated patiently, accompanying her to the lift. ‘Aren’t you coming . . . ?’ she asked, at sixes and sevens when he made no attempt to join her.

He didn’t answer. Just gave a reassuring smile and let the doors close behind her.

Frank walked slowly around the room. A frugally furnished office. Desk and various items of office equipment. Just one niche for meetings, two sofas and a couple of good chairs assembled around a table, broke the impression of workplace. Quite a large archive partition closed off the meeting area.

He took his time. Studied the brochures in the wall-mounted displays. Read the titles of the literature on the various shelves. Went over to the filing cabinet and tried a drawer. It was locked. Frank frowned. Tried another. Locked. All the drawers were locked. He examined the lock. It was new. Along the cracks between the metal and the drawers he could see marks. The drawers had been forced and someone had changed the lock.
Why would anyone go to the trouble of locking up this filing cabinet? Five employees in a tiny company. Didn’t they trust one another?

The light from the windows fell on two other desks. On one there was a white strip of paper taped to the side of the telephone. Reidun Rosendal’s. Her name in neat blue writing. Small flattened loops between the curves. Her place, he thought, and sat down. Opened the drawers. Examined them without finding anything of interest. They were empty. No engagement diary. No personal papers. Just loose pens, a coloured ribbon for a printer and some files. An empty Coke bottle rolling around in the bottom drawer when he opened it. On top, under glass, a passport-size photograph. He lifted the sheet of glass, coaxed the picture out and studied it. Black and white photograph. Face in half-profile. A blonde leaning back, tossing her hair while looking in the mirror. Self-satisfied expression. A woman who liked what she saw in the mirror. But she was young.

He placed the photograph on the desktop. How old was it? It had been taken in a machine and he thought he detected a haze over her eyes. Bit tipsy perhaps. Permed curls and long hair. The girl he had seen dead on the floor had had spiky, relatively short hair. So the picture was not the latest.

She liked it from behind, Bregård had said. Frank discovered something he had not seen in that transparent dead face of hers. Something the photograph had succeeded in catching. Something special about the mouth, about the lips. It was this combination. The mouth, the eyes and teeth that made her face sensual.

Whoever adopted Bregård’s approach did not know what they were missing, Frank thought, putting the photo in his inside pocket.

At that moment the lift hydraulics sounded. The lift stopped on his floor and a woman emerged.

A woman, also in her best years. Attractive full lips and discreet make-up. An elegant shoulder bag banged against her hip as she panted along, laden with her shopping, before she collapsed in an office chair and noticed the policeman, who got to his feet. Then she stood up and swayed over to him while removing a pair of black leather gloves. Hands: slim, elegant, not too much gold. The metal was limited to a row of thin bracelets that jangled as he shook her hand. It was dry and nice to hold.

‘Morning,’ she said. ‘I’m Sonja Hager.’

With her she brought a breath of fresh air from outside. Stared him in the eye with a curious little smile as he introduced himself.

‘Then we’ve already spoken to each other,’ she exclaimed in recognition, and continued in a hushed tone:

‘It was a terrible shock. It’s one thing having a person you see so much of die and quite another to hear she has been killed in such an awful manner.’

She turned and hung up the furry animals she was wearing on a small hook behind the lift doors. Then she appeared in lady-like culottes and a flowery waistcoat over a loose blouse. Dark, thick hair in free fall over her shoulders. An affluent lady. Someone who drove an expensive car and almost certainly collected Royal Danish porcelain.

‘Some men should be castrated, that’s my opinion,’ she opined airily, adjusting her blouse.

Frank observed two chains around her neck. A short one in gold and a longer one with the pendant hidden, along with her breasts which rippled somewhere beneath her clothes.

‘It has not yet been established whether she was sexually molested or not.’

‘But it’s patently obvious she was!’

She burrowed in a cabinet drawer and pulled out a packet of biscuits which she waved around. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’

‘Please.’

She was already by the telephone, dialling a short number and speaking.

‘It’s better like that,’ she told him afterwards. ‘I wouldn’t like to be interrogated in the canteen.’

‘This is not an interrogation.’

‘Call it what you will.’

She took a seat on the sofa on the opposite side of the table. ‘We owe it to Reidun to help so that you can apprehend whoever took her life.’

Frank lifted his notepad with an apologetic expression.

‘How well did you know her?’

‘Barely at all. She was new here, wasn’t she. But very . . .’

She searched for the word. For a moment she seemed absent.

‘Positive,’ she concluded after a spell of gazing inward.

‘We communicated well,’ she added. ‘An intelligent girl able to conduct herself would have friends everywhere. But there was nothing of any depth between us.’

Frank nodded. There was probably quite some distance between the bed-sit in Grünerløkka and the palace where this woman resided.

‘Definitely a good sales person,’ she stated.

They were interrupted by a middle-aged lady carrying two cups of coffee on a tray, which she placed on a box by the door. Sonja got up to bring the tray over. Flicked her curls into place before swaying back. Sat down, crossed one leg over the other and tore a little hole in a cardboard carton of cream.

Frank refused politely – he drank his coffee black – sipped warily at the cup and asked: ‘A good sales person in what way?’

‘In what way are people supposed to be good at sales?’

No flies on this lady. Answers questions with a question. ‘Well . . .’

He dragged out his pause.

‘Slick,’ she suggested with the same unchanging smile. ‘Sales staff are slick, slippery and it’s never easy to know where you are with them.’

Was she telling him something? He couldn’t quite get a handle on her smile. It was a bit too set. And at the back of her eyes there were two piercing arrows.

‘Did Reidun Rosendal have such attributes?’

‘Reidun was intelligent, attractive and . . . young.’

‘Did she have any enemies here in the building?’ he asked calmly.

‘Far from it.’

‘Was there anyone she was particularly fond of?’

Sonja swallowed a mouthful of coffee. ‘No.’

Frank made a note before continuing: ‘Bregård said he was in a relationship with her.’

‘He said
what
?’

She stared down into her coffee cup.

‘Well, that was the impression I was given.’

‘Which impression?’

The reaction was a second too fast. The smile designed to take the edge off the question too rigid. Her lips quivered. Out of control.

Frank concentrated. Leaned forward and poured a bit of cream in his coffee as well, to gain time.

Thereafter he fixed his gaze on a point diagonally above her so as not to ruin whatever had caused the air to go electric. Forced an awkward smile. ‘Nowadays a relationship can mean anything from an engagement to . . .’

That was as far as he got.

She interrupted him with distended lips. ‘. . . a bonk, as some are wont to call it.’

Intense eyes. Taut jaw muscles in two unbecoming knots. As though someone were standing behind her pulling wire fastened to the corners of her mouth.

His eyes met hers. She didn’t appear to notice. Her voice carried towards him from afar, as though she were sitting in a boat on calm waters talking to someone he could not see:

‘As is well-known, some women choose to allow themselves to be used like rags.’

A bubble had burst. For a brief second she stared down into her cup. On raising her eyes again, she was as before. Controlled. Proper. Breasts camouflaged in a loose-fitting blouse. Long, slim legs under shapeless culottes, and her face made up in a cultivated manner to emphasize personality.

‘It’s been a few years since we burned pornographic magazines in the streets.’

Ironic smile.

Frank played along. Returned the smile. Led her off on a tangent, turned his head away, stared out of the window for a few seconds. She took the bait. He could feel her eyes on him, scrutinizing him. He looked back. ‘I apologize if I’ve been clumsy, but I honestly didn’t know that you and Bregård . . .’

‘That’s not how it is, though!’

She laughed, her mouth open wide. When she laughed she was good-looking. Good-looking and proper.

‘Goodness me! Am I so easily misunderstood?’

Not at all, he had not misunderstood anything. But there was something here, something he hadn’t grasped, but which he assumed was lying on the desk in front of him, gift-wrapped, he just couldn’t see it.

‘I run this business with my husband. He’s the Managing Director here.’

Frank peeped down at his notes. ‘I thought for a moment I had been tactless,’ he lied with a prepared smile for the exuberant woman who had taken up residence in her eyes.

She took the bait again. Billowing ripple under the blouse, slight flush of the cheeks.

‘So Terje Engelsviken’s your husband?’

She nodded tentatively. ‘My point is merely that . . .’

She cut herself off in mid-flow. Wrinkled her nose in contempt and looked down in her cup. ‘It makes me so angry! Things happen too easily! It’s not right that everything should revolve around sex!’

‘There is something called love,’ he ventured gently.

She raised her head, cautious. ‘Maybe’, she assented. ‘But what is it, love, I mean?’

Sticky question. ‘Well, I’m not exactly a great philosopher.’

‘But is it philosophy?’

Clearly, this was a matter that preoccupied her. Serious, carefully considered thought was engraved in her features. ‘Human relationships,’ she mused. ‘If two people find each other and build up an existence together, what is it all based upon?’

Sticky one, thought Frank, toffee paper sticking to your fingers.

‘Love,’ he suggested to evade the issue.

Smile came back. Patronizing. From somewhere high up, on a pedestal. Staring down at him, faraway look. ‘Love is a fickle term.’

Didactic tone. Her eyes said: make allowances for him. They were solicitous towards the idiot on the other side of the desk. She was weighing her words now, frightened that he wouldn’t be able to follow, the dim-wit.

‘Fickleness is unable to support anything at all. Certainly not anything as constant as two people’s shared life.’

Frank sighed, stirred his coffee and tentatively cleared his throat.

‘Shared life?’

‘Has it never occurred to you that a vow for some people is serious,’ she harangued. Her taut bloodless lips quivered in her face. Frank spilt coffee on himself. Snatched a serviette from the tray and wiped off the worst. But she was oblivious.

Bent forwards. Fingers as white and trembling as her top lip. ‘For better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health. What does it mean?’

‘For ever,’ he suggested.

The answer appeared to be correct. She composed herself. Not another word.

‘So it has come as a surprise to you that Bregård and Reidun had contact outside working hours?’

She didn’t answer. Just sat staring into the distance. Frank was unsure whether she had heard the question. He coughed.

‘She was thinking only of herself,’ she said all of a sudden.

Frank gawped.

‘Please don’t take that amiss! It’s just that the word
relationship
does not make sense. I would guess they were drawn to each other, but . . .’

He nodded. ‘They were two . . . good-looking, young people who found each other?’

She breathed in. Her voice a touch frosty. ‘I assume it can be expressed in that way.’

There it was again. I suppose they should have got married first, should they, he thought sarcastically, and made so bold: ‘You mean they coupled?’

Calm hands. Vacant, dead eyes. The hand put down the cup without a clink.

Game over.

He leaned back in his chair. Absorbed her. Her beautiful face, closed and impregnable, professional, behind an invisible glass wall.

Frank Frølich was in no hurry. He flicked through his notes without urgency. ‘I’ve spoken to Lisa Stenersen and Bregård.’

Cool nod.

‘What sort of loss will Reidun Rosendal be for the company?’

‘Marginal.’

He inclined his head. ‘Marginal?’

‘As soon as we heard about it we had a meeting. Terje has already found a solution.’

Terje, husband, Managing Director. ‘I haven’t seen Terje yet.’

Another cool nod. ‘I’m afraid he isn’t here today.’

‘We’ll have to save him for later.’

Nod.

‘We have to trace Reidun Rosendal’s last known movements. Therefore it would help me to have a register of customers or a list of clients she visited.’

She straightened her blouse. Stood up. Went over to a machine. Soon a printer was rustling. She tore off the print-out and gave it to him.

The police officer took his leave.

Downstairs, the receptionist was nowhere to be seen. Lisa had said this Kristin Sommerstedt knew the dead girl. Frank glanced at his watch and decided to leave talking to Reidun’s friend until later.

So he went out, opened the car door and turned to look at the building he had left. Glass upon glass. Transparent in places. As shiny and impenetrable as metal in others. To hell with them, he thought, getting in the car. What a bunch!