Satellite People - страница 2

Still dazed, I wished Magdalon Schelderup a good weekend and asked him to take every precaution against possible danger. He assured me that there was no risk of an attempt on his life before Tuesday afternoon, at the earliest. However, he would stay indoors at home until I came to see him on Monday morning and would do everything necessary to ensure his own safety.

Magdalon Schelderup’s voice on the telephone was just as it was on the radio: a grand old man’s voice, calm, convincing and determined. I put down the phone without any further protest and scribbled our meeting on Monday morning at the top of my to-do list for the coming week.

The remaining three-quarters of an hour of my Saturday shift passed without further drama. It was impossible, however, to stop my thoughts from turning to this unexpected telephone conversation. To the extent, in fact, that I called my boss to inform him about the phone call before I left the office. To my relief, he gave his approval of the way in which I had dealt with the situation.

Back home in my flat in Hegdehaugen, I found the latest article about Magdalon Schelderup in the pile of newspapers. It had been published only three days before. Yet another front page of the Aftenposten evening edition was filled with his photograph, this time under the headline ‘King of Gulleråsen’. It concluded by saying that if the richest man in Gulleråsen was not already one of the ten richest men in Norway, then he very soon would be. The value of his property and assets was estimated at over 100 million kroner. Only months before his seventieth birthday, the property magnate and stock market king was at the peak of his career. With increasing regularity, financial experts speculated that he was one of the twenty most powerful men in Norway, though it was now many years since he had retired from his career as a conservative politician.

Over the years, newspapers and magazines had used unbelievable quantities of ink to write about Magdalon Schelderup. To begin with, they wrote about his contributions as a Resistance fighter and politician during and immediately after the war. There was then a rash of speculative and far less enthusiastic articles about the contact his family businesses might have had with the occupying forces during the war, and why a few years later he stepped back from an apparently promising political career. Later articles about his growing wealth and business acumen were frequently alternated with other more critical articles. These discussed his business methods, as well as the breakdown of his first two marriages and the financial settlements that they incurred. The interest in his turbulent private life appeared to have diminished following some further articles in the early 1950s when he married his third wife – this time a woman twenty-five years his junior. In recent years, however, there had been more and more articles that questioned the manner in which he kept shop. Former competitors and employees more or less queued up to condemn his methods and he had regularly been taken to court. With little success. Magdalon Schelderup cared not a hoot what the newspapers and magazines said, and with the aid of some very good sharpshooting lawyers, he was never sentenced in any court.

And it was this dauntless and apparently unassailable magnate who had telephoned me today to say that someone close to him planned to kill him next week.

Thus 10 May 1969 became one of the very few Saturdays when I yearned with all my heart for it to be Monday morning and the start of a new working week. I did not know then that the case would develop very quickly and dramatically in the meantime.

The following morning, 11 May 1969, started like every other Sunday in my life. I caught up with my lack of sleep from the previous week and did not eat breakfast until it was nearly lunch. The first few hours of the afternoon were spent reading the neglected papers from the week gone by. I even managed to read the first four chapters of the book of the week, which was Jens Bjørneboe’s Moment of Freedom.