The Catalyst Killing - страница 5

The real drama in Valdres did not start until two in the morning, when Marie Morgenstierne screamed so loudly that two of the students sleeping in another room woke up.

They came rushing in to find her alone in the bedroom. Falko Reinhardt’s side of the bed was empty. His jacket was still hanging in the wardrobe, but the rest of his clothes and shoes were gone. The window was closed, because of the rain outside.

At this point, my reading was interrupted by an irritating, impatient knocking on my office door. It was five past eleven.

I sighed, put down the papers with considerable reluctance and opened the door. The person responsible for this interruption proved to be a very flustered pathologist.

‘The woman from the tracks was not only dead before the train hit her, but even before she fell on the rails…’ he stammered.

With an impatient wave, I indicated that he should continue. ‘She was shot. I have already established that!’

The pathologist nodded eagerly and bowed, obviously impressed with the pace of my investigation.

‘This is slightly less certain, but I also have reason to believe that she was not shot with an ordinary hunting rifle.’

He nodded even more frantically and bowed even more deeply. ‘It is truly incredible what you have been able to work out by yourself without technical assistance. The bullet appears to come from an older, less common 22-calibre gun, possibly a small-bore rifle or some other relatively light weapon, but could also have been a pistol of some sort.’

I asked the pathologist if he had anything else of importance to tell, then sent him out of the office when the answer was no. My thoughts were still in Valdres in the summer of ’68, on the stormy night when Falko Reinhardt vanished from a bedroom where the window was closed from the inside.

How Falko Reinhardt had disappeared from the cabin was a mystery in itself. According to the police statements, one of the female students in the next room had been awake all night with a headache and the door was ajar. She was able to give an accurate account of who had passed the door after midnight. Marie Morgenstierne had gone out to the kitchen for a glass of water, and one of the male students had gone out onto the step for some fresh air. And the other young man had gone to the toilet. But none of them had seen or heard anything of Falko Reinhardt – and yet he was gone.

According to the statements from Marie Morgenstierne and the others, she was beside herself and convinced that her fiancé had been abducted or murdered. They had discussed the situation for an hour in the hope that he would show up again, but the group grew increasingly uneasy when he failed to appear. It was Marie Morgenstierne who had pushed for them to go out into the storm together at around three in the morning. But there was no sign of Falko or anyone else near the cabin. One of the students said that she saw a person in the distance through the storm, but it was too far away and visibility was too poor for any of the others to verify this.

The five students had then retreated back into the cabin. They had stayed awake for the rest of the night, huddled together in the living room, anxious and upset, without any means of contacting the outside world or doing anything at all.

When the storm subsided the following morning, the students went out together again. There were still no footprints to be found. But they did make a very worrying discovery not far from the cabin.

They found Falko Reinhardt’s left shoe behind a large stone not far from a sheer drop of around three hundred feet.

This obviously made them fear that he might have fallen, been pushed or jumped off the cliff in the dark, though the latter idea made the students indignant and they dismissed it. The theory that Falko Reinhardt’s life had in some way ended on the stones at the base of the cliff was reinforced when his right shoe was found in the scree later in the day.

The only problem was that no one could find Falko Reinhardt, or any trace of him, even when the area was searched twice by a large contingent from the Home Guard. Dead or alive, the missing man had simply vanished, first from the cabin, and then into thin air.