Murder on the Thirty-First Floor (8 page)

Jensen didn’t reply.

‘That’s all,’ said the lab assistant.

The man seemed to be hesitating. After a short, doubtful pause, he said:

‘Er, Inspector?’

‘Yes.’

‘What you said yesterday, I mean about reporting me for professional misconduct. Does it still apply?’

‘Of course,’ said Inspector Jensen.

Ten minutes later, an officer from the uniformed branch came in with the written information.

Once Jensen had read it, he stood up and consulted the big map on the wall. Then he put on his hat and coat and went down to his car.

The office had glass walls, and while Inspector Jensen waited for the foreman of the printing works to come back, he watched the activity on the other side, where staff in white and grey protective coats moved to and fro behind long counters. In the background he could hear the din of the typesetting machinery and printing presses.

On metal hooks along one wall of the office there were damp proofs hung up to dry. The texts, which were set in big, bold typefaces, sang the praises of the publishing house’s papers and magazines. One of them imparted the news that this week one particular paper came with a fold-out poster, a life-size picture of a sixteen-year-old TV star. The poster was printed in ‘glorious full colour and exceptionally beautiful’. The public was urged to buy the paper without delay, before stocks ran out.

‘We do some of the company’s advertising,’ said the foreman. ‘Those are advertisements for the daily papers. Stylish looking stuff, but very expensive. A single one of those costs as much as you or I get paid in a year.’

Inspector Jensen made no comment.

‘But that’s neither here nor there, of course, for the people who own the whole lot, the magazines and the daily press and the printing firms and the paper they print things on,’ said the foreman.

‘Elegant, no doubt about it,’ he said. The man half turned away and popped a pastille in his mouth.

‘You were quite right,’ he said. ‘We did two printing jobs on that paper. About a year back. They were really swish, too. Limited print runs. Only a couple of thousand of each. One was personal headed notepaper for the big boss, and the other one was some kind of diploma.’

‘For the publishing house?’

‘Yep. There ought to be sample copies here somewhere. I’ll show you.’

He hunted through his files.

‘Ah, here they are. Take a look.’

The chairman’s notepaper was quite small in format, and the discreet grey monogram in the top right-hand corner appeared to have been designed to give an impression of reticence and sober taste. Inspector Jensen saw at once that the paper size was considerably smaller than that of the anonymous letter, but he measured it anyway. Then he got out the report from the lab and compared the measurements. They didn’t match.

The second piece of printed paper was a four-page booklet, almost square. The first two pages were blank, and on the third there was some text, printed in gold in big, ornamental Gothic script. It read:

IN RECOGNITION OF THE YEARS OF FRUITFUL COLLABORATION IN THE SERVICE OF CULTURE AND ACCORD WE EXPRESS OUR DEEPLY FELT THANKS.

‘Nice, eh?’

‘What was its intended use?’

‘I don’t know. Some sort of certificate. I suppose someone was going to sign it. Then they’d hand it out. That must have been what it was for.’

Inspector Jensen took his ruler and measured the front cover of the booklet. He took the card from his pocket and compared the measurements. They matched.

‘Have you got any of this type of paper in your store?’

‘No, it’s a special edition. Cost a small fortune, too. And the bits that were left over once we’d done the print job must have been pulped long since.’

‘I’m taking this with me.’

‘We’ve only got the one archive copy,’ said the foreman.

‘Oh?’ said Inspector Jensen.

The foreman was a man of sixty with a lined face and melancholy look. He smelt of alcohol, printing ink and throat sweets and he didn’t say a word more, not even goodbye.

Inspector Jensen rolled up the diploma and left the printing works.

The office of the head of personnel was on the nineteenth floor. The man behind the desk was short and stout with a face like a frog, and his smile was not as well practised as the one used by the head of publishing. It just looked crooked and distorted and malicious. He said:

‘Deaths? Well, there have been one or two jumpers, of course.’

‘Jumpers?’

‘Yes, suicides. You get a few of those everywhere, don’t you?’

His observation was correct. Over the course of the previous year, two pedestrians had been killed in the city centre by falling bodies. Several more had been injured. It was one of the disadvantages of high-rise buildings.

‘And apart from that?’

‘Well, a few people have died in the building in recent years, always of natural causes or as the result of an accident. I’ll have the administrative department send over a list.’

‘Thank you.’

The head of personnel was really making an effort. He managed to make his smile look a little less off-putting and said:

‘Anything else I can do for you?’

‘Yes,’ said Inspector Jensen, unrolling the diploma. ‘What’s this?’

The man looked rather taken aback.

‘An address, or perhaps I should say a farewell letter, for people leaving their employment with us here. They’re very costly to produce, but the intention is to give our former employees a beautiful keepsake, something to remember us by. No expense spared. That’s the way the management sees it, in this as in so many other cases.’

‘Are they presented to everybody when they leave?’

The man shook his head.

‘No, no, of course not. That would be far too expensive. This is a mark of distinction only given to people in top posts, or colleagues in positions of particular trust. At the very least, anyone receiving it must have carried out their duties as required, and been a worthy ambassador for the company.’

‘How many have been handed out?’

‘Only a few. This particular kind is pretty new. We’ve only been using it for six months or so.’

‘Where are the diplomas kept?’

‘With my secretary.’

‘Are they easily accessible?’

The head of personnel pressed a button on his intercom. A young woman came into the room.

‘Is form PR–8 kept where outsiders could get their hands on it?’

The woman looked horrified.

‘No, certainly not. It’s kept in the big steel filing cabinet. I lock it every time I leave the room.’

He waved her out and said:

‘She’s a reliable girl, very thorough. She wouldn’t be here otherwise.’

‘I need a list of all the people who have received diplomas of this type.’

‘Of course. That can be arranged.’

They sat in silence for quite a time, waiting while the list was drawn up. At length, Inspector Jensen asked:

‘What are your main functions in this job?’

‘Hiring editorial and administrative staff. And ensuring that everything possible is done to promote the well-being of the staff, and …’

He paused and smiled a broad smile with his frog mouth. It was hard and cold and appeared entirely genuine.

‘And freeing the publishing house from those who abuse our trust,’ he said. ‘Dealing with staff who’ve neglected their duties.’

A few seconds later, he added:

‘Well, it rarely comes to that, of course, and such cases are handled in the most humane way possible, like everything else here.’

Silence descended on the room again. Inspector Jensen sat entirely still, listening to the throbbing rhythm of the Skyscraper.

The secretary came in with two copies of a list. There were twelve names on it.

The head of personnel read it through.

‘Two of these people have actually died since they took retirement,’ he said. ‘And one has moved abroad, I know that for a fact.’

He took his fountain pen from his breast pocket and put neat little ticks by three of the names. Then he passed the sheet of paper to his visitor.

Inspector Jensen glanced quickly through the list. Each name was followed by a date of birth and some brief details such as ‘early retirement’ or ‘left at his own request’. He folded the list carefully and put it in his pocket.

Before he left, there were two more exchanges between them.

‘May I ask the reason for your interest in this particular detail?’

‘An official matter that I am not at liberty to discuss.’

‘Have any of our farewell letters fallen into the wrong hands?’

‘I don’t think so.’

There were already two men in the lift Inspector Jensen took back down. They were fairly young, and smoked cigarettes while chatting about the weather. They had a nervous, slangy, staccato way of talking that seemed to consist of a series of keywords. It was not at all easy for an outsider to understand.

When the lift stopped on the eighteenth floor, the boss, the chairman of the group, stepped in. He gave an absent nod and stood facing the wall. The two journalists extinguished their cigarettes and took off their hats.

‘Just fancy it snowing,’ one of them said softly.

‘I feel so sorry for all the little flowers,’ said the boss in his attractive, deep voice.

He said it without a single glance at the man who had spoken. He stood immobile with his face turned to the aluminium wall. Nothing more was said for the rest of the journey.

In the lobby, Inspector Jensen borrowed a telephone and rang the lab.

‘Well?’

‘You were right. There are traces of gold dust. In the glue under the letters. Strange that we missed it.’

‘You think so?’

‘Find out this person’s address. And be quick about it.’

The head of the plainclothes patrol stood to attention and went out.

Inspector Jensen studied the list on the desk in front of him. He opened one of the drawers, got out his ruler and drew fine, straight lines through three of the names. Then he numbered the rest, from one to nine, looked at the clock and made a note in small letters at the top of the sheet: Thursday, 16.25.

He got out a fresh notebook, opened the first page and wrote: Number 1, former director of distribution, age 48, married, early retirement on health grounds.

Two minutes later the head of the plainclothes patrol was back with the address. Jensen wrote it down, shut the notebook, put it in his inside pocket and got to his feet.

‘Find out the rest,’ he said. ‘I shall need them as soon as I get back.’

He drove through the city hub of office blocks and department stores, passed the Trades Union Palace and joined the stream heading west. The queues of cars moved quickly along the broad, straight motorway as it cut through industrial areas and vast dormitory towns with thousands of tower blocks lined up in identical columns.

In the clear light of the evening sun, he could clearly see the
pall of greyish exhaust fumes. It was about fifteen metres thick and lay like a bank of poisonous fog over the city.

Several hours earlier he had drunk two cups of tea and eaten four rusks. Now there was a pain on the right of his diaphragm, a dull, heavy ache as if a low-speed drill had been rotating in soft tissue. Despite the pain, he was still hungry.

Another ten kilometres or so further on and the tower blocks looked older and more dilapidated. They rose like pillars from vegetation that had been left untended and was now running wild; large sections of plaster had come away from the uneven, weathered blocks of lightweight concrete, and many of the windowpanes were broken. Once the authorities had found a solution to the housing problem ten years before in mass construction of a type of tower block containing only identical, standard apartments, large numbers of people had deserted the older housing areas. In most of those suburbs, only about a third of the flats were now occupied. The rest were standing empty and had been left to decay, as had the buildings as a whole. The properties were no longer profitable, so nobody bothered with their repair or upkeep. What was more, the blocks had been shoddily built and soon crumbled. Many of the neighbourhood shops had gone bankrupt and closed, or simply been abandoned by their owners, and since the state’s calculations allowed for private car ownership for everyone there was no longer any public or state-owned transport serving the housing estates.

Among the scrubby trees and bushes round the blocks lay shoals of car wrecks and indestructible, throwaway plastic packaging. At the Ministry for Social Affairs they counted on the blocks gradually being abandoned entirely and falling down, at which point the areas would automatically and at no extra cost be converted into rubbish dumps.

He left the motorway, drove over a bridge and found himself on a long, leafy island dotted with swimming pools, bridleways, and white villas along the shore. He drove on for several minutes and then slowed down, turned left, through an open pair of tall wrought-iron gates, drove up to a house and stopped.

The villa was large and expensive, its spotless glass façades creating an impression of luxury. There were three cars parked beside the entrance, one of them large and silvery grey, a foreign make and the latest model.

Inspector Jensen went up the steps and as he passed the electric eye a door chime rang inside the house. The door was immediately opened by a young woman in a black dress and starched, white lace cap. She asked him to wait and disappeared back into the house. The furnishing of the hall and what he could see of the other rooms was modernist and impersonal. It had the same chilly elegance as the management floors of the publishing house.

In the hall there was also a youth who looked about nineteen. He was sitting on one of the steel armchairs with his legs stretched out in front of him, staring apathetically straight ahead.

The man Jensen had come to see was a suntanned, blue-eyed individual with a thick neck, signs of encroaching corpulence, and a supercilious expression on his face. He was wearing casual trousers, sandals and a short, elegant smoking jacket of some woolly sort of fabric.