The Catalyst Killing - страница 2

The doors did nothing to stop the young woman’s desperation. She hammered on them with her fists in despair and then pointed a trembling finger at me, or at something behind me.

I turned around automatically but could see no one else in the carriage. It was only once the train had left Smestad station that I realized she had been pointing at the emergency cord on the wall.

I sat and thought about this strange encounter with the woman on the Lijord Line all the way back into town. The trains were still running every twenty minutes, so it could surely not have been such a disaster that she missed it. By the time I got off at Nationaltheatret, I had dismissed the whole incident, having convinced myself that she was obviously a few sandwiches short of a picnic. I did not regret that I had lacked the sense to use the emergency brake, and thought to myself it was just as well as I would probably never see her again.

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.

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.