Leonard Schelderup sounded slightly calmer by the time we finished our conversation around eleven o’clock. ‘Thank you for taking the time to talk to me this evening, and hopefully we will talk again in the morning!’ were his last words before he hung up.
I did not take the opportunity to ask about his relationship with his father’s secretary, Synnøve Jensen. It was clear from Leonard Schelderup’s mood that it might be best to leave it until tomorrow and to discuss it in daylight.
After I put down the receiver, I sat for a further ten minutes speculating on yet another small mystery within the greater mystery of Magdalon Schelderup’s murder. Even though the day had brought to light a lot of new information, the answer did not feel any closer when I finally went to bed at a quarter past eleven.
The day’s events had also taken their toll on me. I lay there until well past midnight, my mind churning over what had been said, half expecting the telephone to ring again. Then I finally fell asleep, only to be woken by a very odd nightmare. I imagined that Leonard Schelderup had rung me again and begged for a constable to be put on guard as soon as possible.
At a quarter past two I stumbled over to the telephone, annoyed with myself, and dialled the number of the police station to ask if it would be possible to station a police officer outside Leonard Schelderup’s flat in Skøyen. I knew that resources were tight and that posting an officer overnight was limited only to exceptional cases of imminent danger. But I suddenly had the feeling that this was precisely one such extraordinary and dangerous situation. There were a couple of men on duty in case of emergency and they promised that one of them would be outside the address given in Skøyen by three o’clock. I lay tossing and turning for another ten minutes, castigating myself first for having been overcautious and calling out a policeman in the middle of the night, and then for not having done it sooner. The alarm clock glowed a quarter past three by the time sleep overpowered my tired brain. I then slept heavily until the morning, unaware of the drama that had taken place under cover of darkness.
DAY FOUR: On the Trail of a Lonesome Horseman
I
Tuesday, 13 May 1969 was another day with an early start. My telephone rang at twenty-three minutes to eight, just as I put a cup of coffee down on the breakfast table. When I answered ‘Kristiansen, how can I help you?’ there was a couple of seconds of heavy breathing on the other end before a woman’s voice pierced my ear.
‘Is that Detective Inspector Kristiansen? If it is, please can you come immediately? There has been another murder.’
The voice was trembling, and yet impressively controlled and clear. I recognized it immediately as one of the voices I had heard at Schelderup Hall. It took a couple of seconds more before I realized it belonged to Magdalon Schelderup’s former wife, Ingrid. She spoke quickly and was remarkably informative.
‘I am in Skøyen, in my son’s flat. I came to see him this morning, but someone has been here before me. Leonard is lying on the floor with a bullet wound to his head and has obviously been killed. If you come, you can see for yourself!’
The choice of words was rather odd, but her voice was still impressively clear for a woman who had just found her only son murdered. I vaguely recalled Patricia’s words about the hard and strong satellite people involved in this case. Then I mumbled my condolences and asked her to stay where she was with the door locked until I got there. She promised to do this, but added that it was too late to save her son’s life or to catch the murderer.
So Tuesday, 13 May turned into one of the very few days when my breakfast was left untouched on the kitchen table. It took me less than thirty seconds from the time I put down the phone to when I slammed the front door shut behind me.
The drive to Skøyen, on the other hand, felt incredibly long. I remembered what a great experience it had been to watch Leonard Schelderup sail across the finishing line with rare majesty, his long fair hair flowing, to win gold in the Norwegian Championships at Bislett the year before. I also remembered only too well his frightened face at the reading of the will, and his terrified voice on the telephone last night. Now that Leonard Schelderup had in one fell move gone from murder suspect to murder victim, my sympathy welled up.
Alone in the car, I cursed several times the fact that I had not come out to see him last night. For the second time in three days a Schelderup had phoned me and for the second time he had died before I could speak to him. My only defence was that I had offered to station a policeman outside and he had said no. This time I had even ordered a constable to go there several hours later. But the facts of the matter were still brutaclass="underline" Leonard Schelderup had telephoned me yesterday evening to say that he was frightened and this morning he had been shot and killed.
The investigation seemed to be more complicated than ever. I had never truly believed that Leonard Schelderup had murdered his father, but no more than a day ago he had been the only one of the ten who had stood out as a natural suspect, in addition to Synnøve Jensen. And now that he had become a murder victim himself, it felt as though the mystery was getting deeper, despite the fall in the number of possible suspects. Apart from Synnøve Jensen, I could not pick out any one of the nine remaining as a more or less likely double murderer than the rest.
The first person I met at the scene of the crime was the constable who had been standing guard. He immediately came forward when he saw me on the pavement outside. He was a down-to-earth, good police officer who gave a down-to-earth and good report, according to which he had driven here as soon as he had been asked last night and had been standing guard, with a clear view to both sides of the building, since ten to three in the morning. There had been no sign of life in either of the flats in the building at that point. No one had come or gone from either of them, until an older lady, who it turned out was the deceased’s mother, had rung the bell at around twenty past seven. The light in the neighbour’s flat had come on at ten past seven, but there was still no sign of life in Schelderup’s flat by that time.
Thus there was only one clear conclusion, and that was that if Leonard Schelderup had been murdered during the night, the murderer must have done it and left the building before ten to three in the morning.
Ingrid Schelderup stood patiently by the window in her son’s flat while I talked to the constable. She waited to unlock the door until I rang the bell, but then took only a matter of seconds.
The first thing I saw when I stepped into the flat was Ingrid Schelderup’s taut face. The second was her pale, shaking right hand, which was pointing to the floor. And the third was a revolver on the floor where she was pointing. The gun was lying on the carpet just inside the door. With a quick look I could confirm that it was an old Swedish-produced 7.5mm calibre Nagant revolver.
And so one of the small mysteries was solved. The revolver that had disappeared from Magdalon Schelderup’s cabinet had been found again. But that left another, deeper mystery. And that was who had taken it from Magdalon Schelderup’s gun collection in Gulleråsen a day or two earlier, presumably with the intention of aiming it at his younger son?
Leonard Schelderup himself was nowhere to be seen in the hallway. He was lying on the floor in the living room beside an armchair that was facing the television. His body was intact, clean and whole, apart from a bullet wound in his forehead from which the blood had poured freely. One look was enough to confirm that any hope of life was long gone. The flow of blood from the wound had already started to congeal. I quickly estimated that Leonard Schelderup had died in the early hours of the morning, at the latest, and perhaps even late in the previous evening.