‘I just wanted an evaluation of an agency contract. One of your kind colleagues took a copy of it yesterday afternoon.’
‘This?’ Harry pointed to a folder.
‘Exactly.’
‘I was looking at it just now. It was signed and dated two years ago. Is it going to be renewed?’
‘No. I just wanted to be sure I wasn’t being conned.’
‘Only now?’
‘Better late than never.’
‘Haven’t you got your own solicitor?’
‘Yes, but he’s getting on, I’m afraid.’ There was the flash of a gold filling when Clausen smiled and continued speaking. ‘I asked for an introductory meeting to hear what this firm of solicitors could offer.’
‘And you agreed this meeting before the weekend? With a firm which specialises in debt collection?’
‘I only realised that in the course of the meeting. That is, the short while we had before all the uproar.’
‘But if you’re looking for a new solicitor, you must have arranged meetings with several,’ Harry said. ‘Can you tell us which ones?’
Harry didn’t look at Andre Clausen’s face. That wasn’t where a lie would reveal itself. Harry had known immediately they met that Clausen was one of those people who didn’t like his facial expression to reveal what he was thinking. Possibly because of shyness, possibly because his profession required a poker face or possibly because, in his past, self-control had been seen as an essential virtue. Accordingly, Harry kept an eye open for other signs, such as if his hand came up from his lap to stroke his tie again. It didn’t. Clausen just sat looking at Harry. He wasn’t staring, but his eyelids were heavy as if he found the situation irritating, just a little tedious.
‘Most solicitors I rang didn’t want to arrange a meeting until after the holidays,’ Clausen said. ‘Halle, Thune and Wetterlid were a great deal more obliging. Tell me: Am I under suspicion for anything?’
‘Everyone is under suspicion,’ Harry said.
‘Fair enough.’
Clausen said this in English with a precise BBC accent.
‘I’ve noticed that you have a slight accent.’
‘Oh? I’ve travelled a lot in recent years. Perhaps that’s why.’
‘Where do you travel to?’
‘In point of fact, mostly inside Norway. I visit hospitals and institutions. Otherwise I’m often in Switzerland, at the factory where they manufacture the hearing aids. The way products are advancing you have to keep up to date professionally.’
Again this indefinable sarcasm in the tone of his voice.
‘Are you married? Have you got a family?’
‘If you look at the form your colleague filled in, you’ll see I haven’t.’
Harry looked at the form.
‘Yes, I see. So you live on your own… let’s see… in Gimle terrasse?’
‘No,’ Clausen said. ‘I live with Truls.’
‘Exactly. I know.’
‘Do you?’ Clausen smiled, his eyelids sinking a little lower. ‘Truls is a golden retriever.’
Harry could feel a headache coming on behind his eyes. A look at his list showed that he had four interviews before lunch, and five after. He didn’t have the energy to trade blows with them all.
He asked Clausen to tell him again what had happened, from the time he entered the building in Carl Berners plass until the police arrived.
‘More than gladly,’ he said, yawning.
Harry sat back in the chair as Clausen, fluently and with self-confidence, told him how he had arrived by taxi, taken the lift up and, after a brief exchange with the receptionist, had waited for five or six minutes for her to return with the water. When she didn’t come back, he wandered through to the offices and found Mr Halle’s nameplate on his door.
Harry saw from Waaler’s notes that Halle had confirmed the time Clausen knocked on the door as 5.05.
‘Did you see anyone go into or come out of the Ladies?’
‘I couldn’t see the door from where I was waiting in reception. And I didn’t see anyone on the way in or out when I went to the office. In fact, I have repeated this several times now.’
‘And there will be even more times,’ Harry said, yawning aloud and running his hand across his face. At that moment Magnus Skarre knocked on the window of the interview room and held up his wristwatch. Harry recognised Wetterlid standing behind him. Harry nodded in assent and cast a last look at his interview sheet.
‘It says here that you didn’t see any suspicious persons coming into or leaving reception while you were sitting there.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘Well, thank you very much for your cooperation thus far,’ Harry said, putting the sheet in the folder and pressing the stop button on the tape recorder. ‘We’ll certainly contact you again.’
‘No suspicious persons,’ Clausen said, getting up.
‘What?’
‘I said that I didn’t see anyone suspicious in reception, but there was the cleaning lady who came in and went into the offices.’
‘Yes, we’ve talked to her. She says she went straight into the kitchen and didn’t see anyone.’
Harry got up and ran his eye down the list. The next interview was at 10.15 in room four.
‘And the courier of course,’ Clausen said.
‘Courier?’
‘Yes. He went out through the front door just before I went to look for the solicitor. Must have delivered something or picked something up. Why are you looking at me like that, Inspector? A standard courier in solicitors’ offices is, quite frankly, not particularly suspicious.’
Half an hour later, after checking with the firm of solicitors and several courier companies in Oslo, Harry was clear about one thing: no-one had registered the delivery or collection of anything at all at the offices of Halle, Thune amp; Wetterlid on Monday.
Two hours after Clausen had left Police HQ, just before the sun reached its peak, he was picked up at his office and brought back to describe the courier again.
He couldn’t tell them very much: height around one metre 80; average build. Clausen had not exactly studied the man’s physical details. He considered that sort of thing both uninteresting and inappropriate for men, he said, and repeated that the courier was wearing what bike couriers usually wear: a yellow and black cycle shirt in some tight-fitting material, shorts and cycling shoes which clicked even when he walked on the carpet. His face was masked by the helmet and sunglasses.
‘His mouth?’ Harry asked.
‘White cloth covering his mouth,’ Clausen said. ‘Like Michael Jackson uses. I thought bike couriers wore them to protect themselves from inhaling exhaust fumes.’
‘In New York and Tokyo, yes. This is Oslo.’
Clausen shrugged his shoulders. ‘Well, it didn’t strike me as unusual.’
Clausen was given leave to go and Harry went to Tom Waaler’s office. Waaler was sitting with the phone to his ear, mumbling uh-huh and m-hm when Harry walked in.
‘I think I’ve got an idea how the killer got into Camilla Loen’s flat,’ Harry said.
Tom Waaler put down the phone without finishing the conversation.
‘There’s a video camera connected to the intercom at the main entrance to the block where she lived, isn’t there?’
‘Yes…?’ Waaler leaned forwards.
‘Who can ring any bell, stick a masked face up into the camera and still be fairly sure that they’ll be let in?’
‘Father Christmas?’
‘Hardly, but you would let in a person carrying an express package or a bunch of flowers, a courier, wouldn’t you.’
Waaler pressed the engaged button on his phone.
‘Just a little over four minutes passed from the moment Clausen arrived until he saw the courier leave through reception. A courier runs in, delivers and runs out again, he doesn’t spend four minutes hanging about.’
Waaler nodded slowly.
‘A courier on a bike,’ he said. ‘It’s ingeniously simple. Someone with a plausible reason for calling in on all manner of people, with a cloth round his mouth. Someone everyone can see, but nobody notices.’