The Human Flies - страница 6

Before I left her, I asked the caretaker’s wife whether she had noticed anything unusual from her post, especially in the hours before and after the murder.

‘There is one thing,’ she replied, and got up. She indicated that I should follow her into a small back room.

On the table was a large blue raincoat with a hood and a red scarf.

‘I found both of these on top of the rubbish bin by the back door this morning. I’ve never seen any of the residents wearing either the raincoat or the scarf. Both items look more or less brand new, and they both appear to have been washed before they were thrown away, because they are still damp. I didn’t see anyone throwing them away, but they were not there when I went to throw out some leftovers early yesterday afternoon. That’s certainly worth mentioning, isn’t it?’

And I had to agree with her. It was definitely unusual enough to mention that someone had thrown away an almost new and recently washed raincoat on the very day that there was a murder in the building. The blue raincoat was immediately added to my list of questions to ask the residents.

So, Darrell Williams lived in Flat 3B. He was a large, dark-haired American with a firm handshake and an unexpectedly pleasant voice. He showed me his diplomat’s passport, which gave his age as forty-five, though he looked younger. He was at least six foot tall and no doubt weighed well over fifteen stone, but still had little surplus fat. He spoke remarkably good Norwegian, with only the faintest American twang.

When telling me about himself, Darrell Williams explained that his slightly unusual Christian name was due to his Irish ancestry. His grandparents had emigrated to the United States in the 1870s, following the Great Famine. He himself was born and raised in New York, and was the son of a well-known lawyer. Darrell Williams had given up his own law degree in order to sign up for military service after America joined the war, and took part in the Normandy landings in the summer of 1944. The following year, he had come to Norway just after its liberation as a young lieutenant in the US delegation. He soon found himself a Norwegian girlfriend and a post in the American military mission and stayed on in Norway until the spring of 1948. He had learned Norwegian back then and had so many fond memories from that time that he had, nearly twenty years later, applied for a vacant position as attaché at the embassy in Oslo when the opportunity arose. In the intervening years, he had pursued a career in the military and risen to the rank of major, before making the switch to diplomacy in the early 1960s.

In answer to my question regarding his civil status, Darrell Williams’s smile was relaxed and full of self-irony.

‘I got married in the USA in 1951, but the high point of the marriage was when we split up three years later. It resulted in too many arguments and no children. My wife claimed that she left me for a certain man, which would appear to be untrue as she then went on to marry someone else, and to have a child with yet another man!’

The diplomat spoke openly of his disastrous marriage. As a single man with no children, the diplomatic service had allowed him to fulfil his childhood dream of seeing more of Asia and Europe. Over the past decade he had been posted to a number of embassies, but could, ‘with his hand on his heart’, honestly say that he had never seen a capital as beautiful as Oslo.

The embassy had both organized and paid for the flat. And Darrell Williams had no complaints about it, only that due to long working hours and official dinners, he was not here very much, so he did not know the other people in the building particularly well. Williams thought the caretaker and his wife to be ‘orderly and helpful’. The handicapped man on the ground floor was ‘a very cultured and friendly man’ who spoke good English and could discuss Jack London and his other favourite American authors. The young Swedish student also seemed to be ‘nice and knowledgeable’ in the few conversations that Williams had had with her. The taxi driver on the ground floor was a perhaps ‘a simple soul’ and kept a very low profile, but he was interested in football and other sport, so Williams exchanged the odd word with him now and then. They had stopped for a chat about the forthcoming Norwegian Cup game when they bumped into each other by the stairs on the night of the murder.