The Catalyst Killing - страница 26

To my relief, the impressive white building was just as I remembered. To step through the door was still like taking a step back in time to the 1930s. It was Patricia’s father, the professor and company director Ragnar Sverre Borchmann, who had contacted me in connection with my first murder investigation two years ago. This time, he was nowhere to be seen. But I was still graciously received. I was, just as before, unable to tell whether the maid was Beate or Benedikte, as they were identical twins. But I assumed that Benedikte would not be back at work yet as she had had a baby the year before, so I guessed it was Beate, and did not ask. She was standing at the ready as soon as I rang the doorbell, and whispered: ‘Don’t say that I told you, but she’s been looking forward to this and waiting impatiently for you all day.’

I gave her a friendly smile and took this as a sign that our complicity from the two previous investigations had been re-established.

The library – where the now twenty-year-old Patricia Louise I. E. Borchmann had spent most of her waking hours since a car accident had killed her mother and left her paralysed from the waist down – was still the same, too. And there she was, surrounded by all her books, sitting back in her wheelchair, apparently relaxed, with a thick notebook and three ballpoint pens at the ready on the large table.

The new decade had heralded few changes in here. The twenty-year-old Patricia I met in summer 1970 looked more or less the same as the nineteen-year-old Patricia I had fled from in spring 1969. I was convinced that she remembered my hasty retreat, but she did nothing to show it if that was the case. The starter to a delicious three-course meal was already on the table.

It did not feel natural for me to shake her hand, or to initiate any form of physical contact, and fortunately she did not appear to feel inclined either. But it did feel absolutely natural that I should come back here to seek her advice, now that I was once again in the middle of a demanding investigation. It had become part of the world order that we both took for granted; I needed her help to solve my murders, and she needed my help to give her life meaning. So we sat down without shaking hands and this time without any small talk either.

‘Tell me everything,’ she said, the very second that the door closed behind the maid.

Patricia noted down the odd key word as a reminder, but otherwise listened in silence while we consumed the oxtail soup and most of the duck breast. I myself had my work cut out trying to finish both the starter and the first course and still deliver my report of the day’s hearings fast enough to prevent any impatient furrows appearing on Patricia’s brow. It was half past eight by the time I had gone through all the day’s events and reached the end of my visit to the victim’s father.

‘So, what does the genius have to say about Falko Reinhardt’s disappearance and Marie Morgenstierne’s murder so far?’ I asked, before throwing myself with gusto into what remained of my first course.

Patricia smiled.

‘The genius is certainly intelligent enough to see that we still lack too much information to be able to conclude anything about these two rather complicated cases. And at the same time warns that it may take time and energy to solve them. The universes we have dealt with in both our previous cases have been clearly defined, and we have had to separate the truth from lies, and the murderer from the innocent within a limited group of known players. Here we face the curse of public space. Practically the whole of Oslo could in theory have shot Marie Morgenstierne at Smestad yesterday, with the exception of her father and anyone else with a clear alibi. And practically the whole world could, in one way or another, have played a part in Falko Reinhardt’s disappearance in Valdres two years ago. However, bearing in mind the dates, it seems likely that there is some kind of connection between these two events. And I think that we can safely say that the person who shot Marie Morgenstierne is someone she already knew.’