Lisa Stenersen folded her hands in her lap, mumbled something with her eyes closed. A gold crucifix hung from a chain against her throat.
‘She was great,’ she said in the end.
‘You mean attractive?’
‘Mm, lovely hair, nice figure…’
Frank lifted a finger and tapped his temple.
‘What about here?’
‘Don’t know.’ Lisa Stenersen smiled. ‘Doubt if she was lacking in that department either, but… she hid.’
The woman in the padded cloak stared at the floor. ‘There are some people you can never quite fathom, or so it seems!’
With more emotion: ‘Who look at you the way people on TV look at you. What they say is clear enough but you never know if it’s you they are addressing.’
Frank nodded slowly. Lisa Stenersen could have been a member of his mother’s sewing circle. So, it was easy to imagine how Reidun’s words had fallen on stony ground whenever she spoke to her.
He observed her big hair, registered the roll of women’s magazines beside the brown handbag on her desk. The wedding ring that had become buried in the flesh of her ruddy finger. Lisa Stenersen, a representative of the silent army that knows all about meringues, birthday cakes, England’s dismal royal family and how to grow Christmas begonias from cuttings. An age gap of at least thirty years from Reidun Rosendal. A gap that did not necessarily mean much in some cases, but did bear some significance here.
Lisa Stenersen squirmed under his gaze and looked away.
‘That would suggest she wasn’t that stupid,’ he ventured.
She paused.
‘Did she have lots of suitors?’
‘Don’t know. There was no talk of a steady boyfriend at any rate. She and Bregård used to josh around. But that was the tone with her, if you see what I mean. Reidun was probably used to a bit of all sorts, flirting and so on.’
The latter was followed by bashful laughter. She added: ‘There was always a frivolous atmosphere around her.’
‘You two were not very close then?’
‘No, we weren’t.’
‘Do you know who she was closest to here?’
‘Kristin Sommerstedt.’
‘She doesn’t work with us,’ she added with alacrity. ‘But I’m sure you saw her in reception.’
He remembered the receptionist with the birthmark under her lip.
‘I think they had a lot in common,’ she said and peeped at her watch again. ‘Do you think…?’
‘Yes, no problem at all,’ he assured her amiably. ‘That’s fine. We’ll be in contact if there is anything.’
‘I’m happy to go to the police station,’ she declared, grabbing the roll of magazines and her handbag from the desk. Glanced at her watch. ‘It’s just that I…’
‘No problem at all,’ Frank repeated patiently, accompanying her to the lift. ‘Aren’t you coming…?’ she asked, at sixes and sevens when he made no attempt to join her.
He didn’t answer. Just gave a reassuring smile and let the doors close behind her.
11
Frank walked slowly around the room. A frugally furnished office. Desk and various items of office equipment. Just one niche for meetings, two sofas and a couple of good chairs assembled around a table, broke the impression of workplace. Quite a large archive partition closed off the meeting area.
He took his time. Studied the brochures in the wall-mounted displays. Read the titles of the literature on the various shelves. Went over to the filing cabinet and tried a drawer. It was locked. Frank frowned. Tried another. Locked. All the drawers were locked. He examined the lock. It was new. Along the cracks between the metal and the drawers he could see marks. The drawers had been forced and someone had changed the lock. Why would anyone go to the trouble of locking up this filing cabinet? Five employees in a tiny company. Didn’t they trust one another?
The light from the windows fell on two other desks. On one there was a white strip of paper taped to the side of the telephone. Reidun Rosendal’s. Her name in neat blue writing. Small flattened loops between the curves. Her place, he thought, and sat down. Opened the drawers. Examined them without finding anything of interest. They were empty. No engagement diary. No personal papers. Just loose pens, a coloured ribbon for a printer and some files. An empty Coke bottle rolling around in the bottom drawer when he opened it. On top, under glass, a passport-size photograph. He lifted the sheet of glass, coaxed the picture out and studied it. Black and white photograph. Face in half-profile. A blonde leaning back, tossing her hair while looking in the mirror. Self-satisfied expression. A woman who liked what she saw in the mirror. But she was young.
He placed the photograph on the desktop. How old was it? It had been taken in a machine and he thought he detected a haze over her eyes. Bit tipsy perhaps. Permed curls and long hair. The girl he had seen dead on the floor had had spiky, relatively short hair. So the picture was not the latest.
She liked it from behind, Bregård had said. Frank discovered something he had not seen in that transparent dead face of hers. Something the photograph had succeeded in catching. Something special about the mouth, about the lips. It was this combination. The mouth, the eyes and teeth that made her face sensual.
Whoever adopted Bregård’s approach did not know what they were missing, Frank thought, putting the photo in his inside pocket.
At that moment the lift hydraulics sounded. The lift stopped on his floor and a woman emerged.
12
A woman, also in her best years. Attractive full lips and discreet make-up. An elegant shoulder bag banged against her hip as she panted along, laden with her shopping, before she collapsed in an office chair and noticed the policeman, who got to his feet. Then she stood up and swayed over to him while removing a pair of black leather gloves. Hands: slim, elegant, not too much gold. The metal was limited to a row of thin bracelets that jangled as he shook her hand. It was dry and nice to hold.
‘Morning,’ she said. ‘I’m Sonja Hager.’
With her she brought a breath of fresh air from outside. Stared him in the eye with a curious little smile as he introduced himself.
‘Then we’ve already spoken to each other,’ she exclaimed in recognition, and continued in a hushed tone:
‘It was a terrible shock. It’s one thing having a person you see so much of die and quite another to hear she has been killed in such an awful manner.’
She turned and hung up the furry animals she was wearing on a small hook behind the lift doors. Then she appeared in lady-like culottes and a flowery waistcoat over a loose blouse. Dark, thick hair in free fall over her shoulders. An affluent lady. Someone who drove an expensive car and almost certainly collected Royal Danish porcelain.
‘Some men should be castrated, that’s my opinion,’ she opined airily, adjusting her blouse.
Frank observed two chains around her neck. A short one in gold and a longer one with the pendant hidden, along with her breasts which rippled somewhere beneath her clothes.
‘It has not yet been established whether she was sexually molested or not.’
‘But it’s patently obvious she was!’
She burrowed in a cabinet drawer and pulled out a packet of biscuits which she waved around. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’
‘Please.’
She was already by the telephone, dialling a short number and speaking.
‘It’s better like that,’ she told him afterwards. ‘I wouldn’t like to be interrogated in the canteen.’
‘This is not an interrogation.’
‘Call it what you will.’
She took a seat on the sofa on the opposite side of the table. ‘We owe it to Reidun to help so that you can apprehend whoever took her life.’
Frank lifted his notepad with an apologetic expression.
‘How well did you know her?’
‘Barely at all. She was new here, wasn’t she. But very…’