The Catalyst Killing - страница 6

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Falko Reinhardt had taken several language courses at the University of Oslo, but at the time of his disappearance was a good way through writing his thesis for a master’s degree in history. He had written about a Nazi network during the war. A few weeks before he disappeared Reinhardt had told his supervisor, the renowned professor Johannes Heftye, that he had made a remarkable discovery that could indicate that parts of the network were still active.

One of the main leads in the investigation after this was an elderly, wealthy farmer called Henry Alfred Lien, a former convicted Nazi, who had been a member of the fascist Nasjonal Samling in Valdres. According to the thesis, he had been active in the network during the war. However, Lien proved to be ‘extremely uncommunicative’ in his meeting with the police in 1968. He claimed to have been at home on his farm a good few miles away on the night in question, and denied any knowledge of Falko Reinhardt’s disappearance.

He also threatened the police with legal action if anything was said to link his name to the case, so of course that never happened. There was no evidence that Falko Reinhardt had been the victim of a criminal act, and even less that Henry Alfred Lien was involved in his disappearance. To be on the safe side, and at his own cost, Lien had travelled to Oslo and taken a lie-detector test, during which he answered only two questions. The first was whether he had participated in the abduction of a student by the name of Falko Reinhardt. The second was whether he had been involved in the death of a student by the name of Falko Reinhardt. According to the attached certificate, the answer from the lie detector to both questions had been a clear no.

No other suspicious activity had been registered in the area on the night of the storm. A slightly sozzled youth on his way home from a birthday party a few miles further down the valley had tried, without success, to hitch a lift from a car that had sailed past him at high speed around four in the morning. He thought there had only been one person in the car, and his description of ‘a somewhat overweight man or woman of around forty’ was firstly too vague, and secondly bore no resemblance to Falko Reinhardt. As the tipsy young lad could not give a reliable description of either the driver or the car in the dark, his handwritten statement remained a simple appendix in the file.

And with that, the head of the investigation cautiously concluded that ‘there is currently no evidence to justify further investigation’, and the hunt for the truth regarding Falko Reinhardt’s fate came to a halt. The final documents in the file were two short letters from 1969 – a handwritten one from Falko Reinhardt’s parents, and a typed one from Marie Morgenstierne – which both complained about the perceived lack of police engagement in the case.

The investigation into the disappearance of Falko Reinhardt had taken place while I was on holiday and had been led by Detective Inspector Vegard Danielsen. He was the youngest detective inspector after me, and was possibly even more ambitious – and he was one of those endlessly irritating people who embody guile, but are also extremely competent.

In short, I did not particularly wish to discuss the Reinhardt case with Detective Inspector Vegard Danielsen, and was even less keen to involve him in any way in my investigation into the murder of Marie Morgenstierne. The idea of solving both cases right under his nose, with secret help from Patricia, was far more appealing. So I put the file to one side, but kept the exemplary list of the telephone numbers and addresses of the witnesses in the Falko Reinhardt case to hand, as it was currently the best starting point for establishing the truth about the murder of Marie Morgenstierne.

V

According to the file, Falko Reinhardt’s parents were Arno Reinhardt, a photographer, and his wife Astrid, who lived at the end of Seilduk Street in Grünerløkka. ‘NOTE: NORWEGIAN COMMUNIST PARTY!’ had been scribbled in the margin of the filing card in Detective Inspector Danielsen’s annoyingly neat handwriting.