But where did he write it down? The policeman wheeled round. Crossed the room. Opened a drawer. Here. Pencils. Biros. But no paper. He cast around, thinking. No paper. No pad or notebook. Nothing to write on. Just a pile of porn mags. Of course. Gunnarstranda’s fingers quivered. Of course! The porn mags. He smiled. Lifted the pile on to the table. Bent down to the floor, looked for more magazines, crawled around on all fours, peered under the sofa. No. There were only these ones. He sat down, got up again, switched on a wall lamp, sat down again and started slowly leafing through the top magazine.
47
It was morning. The sun was shining from an azure spring sky above Oslo’s rush-hour traffic. All the lanes in Bispegata were crammed with fuming commuters, sleepy buses and groaning long vehicles.
Frank Frølich was at the wheel and experiencing butterflies in his stomach. The expectation. Something had happened. What smarty pants call the breakthrough in an investigation. They were almost there. It was clear from the way they spoke. The way words were articulated.
The car inched its way forward in the right-hand lane, on its journey west, out of town, under the Traffic Machine, Oslo’s spaghetti junction. The queue was barely moving and he was driving with his bumper up the bum of the next car, to stop cheeky buggers nosing their way in. Gunnarstranda had met him half an hour ago, with red-rimmed eyes and a serious face. The boss was a shadow of his former self, as they say. Hadn’t even bloody said ‘Morning’, just dangled a bunch of car keys and led towards the garage with his coat-tails flapping behind him. The old guy’s silence was unnerving. The jittery atmosphere had made him feel different, too. His mouth had already gone dry. The silence had been intolerable, so he had started to report back on the conversation with the owner of Scarlet. Afterwards he dropped the bombshell, ventured a theory. Not much to brag about perhaps, but the sequence of events was right. He had gone through the whole story. The restaurant-owner had said that Engelsviken had been at Scarlet at the same time as Reidun. So, the woman’s employer, the man for whom she would not be a mattress any longer, this shark, had been there at the same time as her, a short time before she was murdered. Engelsviken, a green-eyed, jilted lover, had stood watching his dream-girl dancing and rubbing her body against an upstart of twenty-five. The MD had had to watch calmly while she was picked up, and he had even made a fuss when the couple went off for further entertainment. Thereafter the man had drunk himself silly and had had so much pent-up aggression inside him that he kicked a glass door to smithereens, causing four thousand kroners’ worth of damage, at half past three in the morning, two hours before Reidun Rosendal was last seen alive.
Frank had described in great detail how the man in the silk suit had been carried out of the room and heaved into his wife’s car, whatever repercussions that might have meant. He didn’t suppose a piss-artist who had just smashed the glass door of one of Oslo’s in-places was likely to be very keen to have his own wife collect him. The man had probably made her stop somewhere close by Reidun’s flat, then he had staggered out of the car, max two hours before she was laid low with her own bread knife.
Frank thought the whole thing was fairly convincing as he listened to himself babbling away. Granted the theory didn’t take much account of the burglaries with which his boss was so fascinated, but there was a good chance they were a dead end, anyway. Nevertheless, he was disappointed at his boss’s reaction. Gunnarstranda had paid close, patient attention, but the excitement had not reached his hands. Nor had he lit a cigarette with a triumphant glint in his eyes. Instead he had lowered his head, with three deep creases in his forehead, and had then begun to talk about Reidun’s damned neighbour, this Joachim Bjerke, and a company called Ludo. And insisted that it was Bjerke who had committed the burglaries, although he hadn’t stolen anything. Just because the guy ran this Ludo company on his own and Engelsviken owed him money.
‘Why did this Joachim Bjerke break in then?’ asked Frølich after his passenger finally shut up and would not say any more.
‘For some letters and a tape.’
Gunnarstranda chewed the inside of his cheek. Eyes in ruminative mode.
‘Evidence. Bjerke was Engelsviken’s accountant. The accountancy company A/S Ludo was employed by Engelsviken on a contractual basis.’
Frank nodded without saying a word. Let his boss continue with his findings unchecked. ‘This is all about Engelsviken’s past,’ his boss declared, gesticulating, and carried on about angry creditors. Lenders who didn’t get either the interest rates, or any instalments, or for that matter payment for goods they had placed with the engineer, who as yet had not gone bankrupt.
‘It’s about Terje Engelsviken, who was still managing to bankrupt companies. Every time Engeslviken went bust the lenders never got what they were due in settlement.’
Frank smiled as the car on the right honked its horn. A plump face with a tightly knotted tie and a bushy beard was cursing him roundly from behind the windscreen.
‘A/S Bodge ’n’ Dodge? As your brother-in-law said?’
‘Exactly. Joachim Bjerke told me everything yesterday. The fellow was unstoppable. It was like pulling the plug out of the bath.’
Gunnarstranda described how the air had gone out of the arrogant toad on the sofa, like a puncture.
The inspector had maintained his mask during the confession, and did not let on that he knew all about the barn outside Drammen where warehouse computers and accessories had been sold before and during the bankruptcies. Nor that the profits from the illegal sales were pocketed by Engelsviken. What was news was that Engelsviken’s accountant knew how little was left for the creditors when the receiver was brought in. Engelsviken had left them nothing apart from the coffee machine and a photocopier. Of course the administrators were angry. Engelsviken and Co. were reported to the police every time. But then, at the eleventh hour, papers and assurances from A/S Ludo popped up. Joachim Bjerke vouched for the accounts and proved that everything was above board; all the items had been sold a long, long time before. The administrator had therefore to accept that all the equity and assets had leached from the company en route to insolvency.
Gunnarstranda shrugged. ‘Of course, the creditors protested,’ he sighed. ‘They claimed that Engelsviken had transgressed time limits and so on.’
Frank nodded slowly. He knew the answer: case shelved for lack of evidence.
‘Each time, the police were faced with a mass of contradictory claims,’ the inspector explained. ‘Vague evaluations of assets, kilos of paper and dates over which no one ever had a real perspective. The cases shuttled to and fro between the Fraud Squad and Oslo Police Headquarters without anyone delving deep enough in the shit to be able to justify a charge being brought. In the end the cases were placed on the shelf marked “unsolved”.’
He closed his eyes for a fraction of a second. ‘But it became harder for Engelsviken to gain trust in the business community. Stories started circulating about him. He gained a certain notoriety and had difficulty being taken seriously, black-listed as he was as a bad payer. Engelsviken was a rotten apple long before he hatched the concept of Software Partners. Since the usual creditors could not be milked, he had to find a new target group to bleed dry: computer dealers. The idea was brilliant. To cheat co-owners. The only problem was digging up enough gullible optimists.’