Hans Lahlum - Chameleon People

‘And in any case, she is a genius, of course, but you are much smarter than you appear to be when all you do is follow her instructions. You would have solved your last murder cases without her, it would just have taken a bit more time and you might have needed a bit more help from me. So I don’t think you should call her just yet, I think you should talk to me a bit more first.’

Miriam smiled her lopsided, mischievous smile as she said this. I smiled back, kissed her and said that I would definitely rather talk to her than Patricia in her luxury palace in Frogner.

‘Have you by any chance ever heard the name Marinus here in Norway? I don’t think he is actually called that, but there must be a reason for him telling me that he was.’

Miriam straightened up and shook her head. ‘No. It’s an ancient Roman name that I’ve never heard used here. In fact, the only Marinus I have heard of since the Middle Ages, is the man who was beheaded after the Reichstag fire in Germany. I can’t remember his surname – Lubbe, or something like that? That was also a very strange story and a sad fate, if I remember rightly. It must have been sometime in 1933, or 1934 at the latest.’

Miriam and bookshelves are a story unto themselves. The first time she came to my flat, she went straight to my bookshelves and stood there for about ten minutes. Now, she was sitting beside me one minute, behaving like a perfectly normal fiancée, the next she was over by the bookshelves at the other end of the room, holding one of her favourite books: a five hundred-page history of the twentieth century in Europe. She flicked through it as fast as she could, then suddenly her face lit up with an almost childishly smug smile.

‘He was called Marinus van der Lubbe – and it was December 1933! A rather disturbed, and almost blind, young man who was made into a scapegoat, even though it would seem that there were far stronger and more wilful parties behind it.’

I jumped up and went over to the bookshelves. Miriam held the book out and looked at me with a triumphant smile. I congratulated her on her excellent memory and immediately took the book.

There was a photograph of Marinus van der Lubbe standing between two prison guards with the Nazi emblem sewn on their uniforms. In purely physical terms, he bore no resemblance to our arrestee in Oslo in 1972. The 1933 Marinus van der Lubbe was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his early twenties, with short curly hair and surprisingly intense eyes. According to the text under the photograph, he had fallen asleep during the trial and had shown many signs of mental distress. However, the similarities in his case and the current situation were striking and thought-provoking.

‘Not everyone who read about Marinus van der Lubbe would be able to see the parallels, to be fair,’ I said slowly. I handed the book back to her, without thinking that it was, in fact, mine.

Miriam smiled, closed the book and put it back in its place, once again with a slightly triumphant air. ‘You can certainly say that. And based on that we can ascertain that the suspect is an unusually well-read boy. But that, of course, does not mean that he is not in some way mentally disturbed. My books on the history of literature are full of examples of people who are well read and totally mad!’ She let out one of her slightly morbid little laughs as she said this, but was soon serious again. ‘Well, we have certainly made a step forwards and you now have a couple of new questions to ask of your mysterious arrestee. Perhaps you should drive down to the station now and see if you can get some answers.’

She looked at me questioningly. I glanced at my watch. As always, the hours had slipped by in Miriam’s inspiring company. It was already a quarter past ten. I had certainly not planned to go out again this evening and did not want to now, either. So I shared my thoughts on the matter. In other words, that I could just as well ask him the questions first thing tomorrow morning rather than late on Sunday night, and that I had some slightly different plans for the rest of the evening.

‘Good,’ Miriam replied. She smiled when she said this. And I smiled back.

Miriam was better than me when it came to falling asleep. Particularly when she had lectures the following morning. She said goodnight at half past eleven and was fast asleep three minutes later.

I lay there and looked at her peaceful face. I would never say it to Miriam, as I wanted her image of me as a hero to remain, as far as possible, intact, but on evenings like this I felt I was not only an incredibly lucky man, but also an undeservingly lucky one. With Patricia’s help, I had gained a reputation and position in the police force that I could never have imagined was possible only five years ago. And thanks to having met Miriam, my private life was better than ever before.

Despite the unsolved case, my life as I knew it still felt good and secure. I found myself hoping that the remaining questions would be answered tomorrow and that we could confirm that the arrestee was indeed guilty, whether he was mentally disturbed or not. However, I still had a sneaking feeling that things would not be that simple. The story from 1932 was so striking that it seemed highly unlikely that it was sheer coincidence that one of the others in the group had now been killed forty years later.

I lay there thinking about it for nearly a quarter of an hour. And then I pondered for a further ten minutes about the boy on the red bicycle and why on earth he had come to my flat. Almost against my will, I found myself wondering what Patricia would have to say about the whole thing.

And so eventually I fell asleep just before midnight on Sunday, 19 March 1972, with my eyes on Miriam and my mind on Patricia.

I heard the alarm clock ring, but felt incredibly tired. I was relieved to discover that for some reason it was only ten past six – and so I went back to sleep.

I then slept very heavily until the alarm clock rang for a second time at ten to seven. At which point I woke with a start and sat bolt upright when I realized that I was alone in bed.

Fortunately, I remembered within seconds that Miriam had said that she had to go into the People Against the EEC office to sort out some post before her morning lecture.

I was still tired at ten to seven, so once again I was impressed by my fiancée’s irrepressible energy and efficiency. On my way to the bathroom, I mused on the possibility of a no vote in the autumn referendum, despite the hard sell by Labour and the Conservatives.

The flat felt very quiet and almost gloomy without Miriam’s bright voice, so I turned on the radio as I sat down to breakfast. The latest developments in the EEC debate were the second item in the morning news on Monday, 20 March 1972. The first was a minor sensation, and that was that Norway and the Soviet Union were close to reaching an agreement on rights in connection with any findings of oil and gas in the Barents Sea. Negotiations had progressed unexpectedly and it was hoped that a draft agreement would be ready for endorsement by next Monday. The acting leader of the Storting’s Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs considered this to be excellent news which could be of great importance to the future of the country. He expressed his hope that the draft agreement would be passed by the Storting as early as the end of the week.

For a few minutes, I forgot the murder investigation and listened to the news with keen interest. It was no more than a few years since one of the foreign engineers involved in exploratory drilling in the North Sea had stated that he could personally drink all the oil to be found there. But now oil was being extracted with such success that there was talk of establishing a government-owned oil company in Norway. In my discussions with my father last year, I had always maintained that the oil industry could be a possible solution to the increasingly obvious problems in traditional industry. He did not agree. Whereas I believed that the oil industry could provide an income of up to several hundred million a year, he believed that it would never be more than tens of millions at the most.