I replied that unless there were any unexpected surprises in the course of the day that would be very tempting indeed. She thanked me politely, then added somewhat more discourteously that I should call Rønning, Rønning & Rønning immediately, in order to solve the hopefully more manageable mystery of Magdalon Schelderup’s will.
I took the hint and put down the receiver. I needed a few minutes to gather my wits before I looked up the number for Edvard Rønning Junior in the telephone directory. With alarmed delight I recognized the fact that I still lagged behind as soon as Patricia’s reasoning accelerated, but that my investigation was already picking up pace before I had even had my first meeting with her.
XV
Following a couple of abortive attempts, I managed to get hold of Edvard Rønning Junior at home at around ten o’clock. He informed me that the deceased had requested that the will be read at Schelderup Hall, and had provided a list of those he wished to be present. However, there were no specific instructions as to when the will should be read, as had been the case with Harald Olesen. I therefore suggested that it should be the following afternoon, on the condition that as head of the murder investigation I should be informed of the most salient points in the will. Rønning Junior pointed out that officially a court ruling was required, but added that he ‘had no objections per se, provided that the solution ensured that the will was read in accordance with the wishes of the deceased’. There was, however, a temporary practical problem in that the will was in his office, which was now closed for the weekend.
The practical-versus-principle compromise was that Mr Rønning Junior would be in the office by half past eight on Monday morning and would phone me immediately to let me know the contents of the will. He would then instruct his office to telephone or telegraph those people named on the list to request their presence at the reading of the will in the deceased’s home at three o’clock that afternoon. I assured him that this would be easy enough to organize, as the deceased’s nearest and dearest had all been instructed to stay in town and were unlikely to have made plans for the following day. I felt that we were both more relaxed towards the end of the conversation and I saw no reason to make more problems than I already had with the investigation. We thanked each other courteously for being so accommodating and even put the receiver down at the same time.
It was only then that it crossed my mind that I had yet to make a very important phone call – to the commanding officer. It struck me instantly that the case might be taken from me before it had even started. I could under no circumstances wait until the following day for fear that one of my colleagues might hear about the case in the meantime and snatch it from me. So I looked up the commanding officer’s home number on my telephone list and dialled straight away.
Fortunately I caught my boss before he went to bed, and as luck would have it, he was in the better of his two known moods. He listened patiently for ten minutes to my account of the start of this peculiar case, then for another two minutes while I reminded him of my success as head of investigation for last year’s most spectacular murder case. Then to my delight he interrupted me to say that it was his wish that I should also head this murder investigation, certainly until further notice. He added that there might be changes if too many days passed without a breakthrough, and that he would like a short report of the day’s events every evening. He merrily quoted the former foreign minister, Halvdan Koht: ‘That is my opinion, and I must respect it!’ I had heard him say this several times before, but laughed heartily all the same and did not object in any way to his conclusions.
I was in bed by eleven o’clock, as I knew that Monday could well be a long and demanding day. But I lay there unable to sleep until about midnight, but still had not managed to find an answer to the Magdalon Schelderup mystery. I was barely able to pick out one of the guests as a more likely murderer than the others.
DAY THREE: The Box That Contained Something Strange
I
Edvard Rønning Junior was an exceptionally correct young man. He telephoned me at the office, as agreed, at precisely half past eight on Monday, 12 May 1969, and read Magdalon Schelderup’s will to me from heading to signature. It did not take more than a couple of minutes, even though he read at an irritatingly slow speed. The will was dated 6 May the same year and comprised four short paragraphs. After the previous day’s interviews, the content struck me as particularly interesting, although I had to admit that the significance of it remained unclear.
The first paragraph of the will was a sentence to say that the manager Hans Herlofsen, as thanks for his long and loyal service, was to have waived the ‘small amount’ still outstanding on his ‘private loan drawn up in 1949’. There then followed a short sentence to say that ‘the promissory note and associated written material’ had been destroyed.
The second paragraph of the testament was one sentence only where Magdalon Schelderup left his wife Sandra Schelderup two million kroner.
The third paragraph consisted of two sentences where Magdalon Schelderup acknowledged that he was the father of his secretary Synnøve Jensen’s unborn child and left her the sum of 200,000 kroner for ‘subsistence costs and necessary expenses during the remainder of the pregnancy’.
The fourth paragraph was the longest and most complicated. It stated that the remainder of Magdalon Schelderup’s wealth and assets should be divided equally between his children on 6 May 1970. The three grown children would each receive for immediate payment no more than their legal minimum share of 200,000 kroner.
I thanked the lawyer for his help and assured him that I would be there for the reading of the will, and requested that the contents should remain confidential until it was read out to the deceased’s family and friends.
It was only once I had put down the receiver that I realized that I had not asked whether any previous versions of the will existed, and if that were the case, what was said there. When I tried to call the lawyer back it was engaged both times, so I decided to leave it until after the reading. There was more than enough work to be done in the meantime.
II
The pathologist’s preliminary report was as expected. Magdalon Schelderup had died of heart failure, caused by an extreme allergic reaction to nuts. He had been in good shape for his age, but had no chance of surviving such an attack. His heart and body were otherwise those of a sixty-nine-year-old man who had worked hard all his life, and the nut allergy had obviously been extremely severe.
The reports in the newspaper did not pose any problems, but neither did they help to solve the mystery. The Labour Party conference dominated the headlines. The communist paper, Friheten, had a report on the front page under the headline ‘Key capitalist murdered’ and hinted at a conspiracy amongst ‘Norway’s corrupt capitalist elite’. Other newspapers were more cautious and waited to see the consequences of the death, but instead wrote reams about the deceased’s wealth and earlier profiles. Aftenposten was the only paper to publish a list of the supper guests and concluded its report by saying that ‘we are delighted to confirm that the already famous Detective Inspector Kolbjørn “K2” Kristiansen has been assigned to the case, and wait with bated breath to see whether he can scale the heights of his previous success in this apparently very mysterious case’. I read this with great satisfaction, but also with increasing anxiety, knowing how far I could fall.