Hans Lahlum - Chameleon People

‘Dark hair, thin, about five foot three. He should be easy to recognize as he has a limp in his right foot and a large birthmark on his neck.’

All the pieces fell into place as she spoke. I felt enormous relief, for my part, and great sympathy for the mother.

I told her, as calmly and reassuringly as I could, that her son was alive and unharmed, but that he had been remanded on suspicion of a very serious crime.

His mother gasped. It sounded as though she might faint right there in the telephone box. ‘Goodness! What on earth has Tor done now?’ she almost whispered.

I asked if she had heard that the politician Per Johan Fredriksen had been stabbed and killed. Her first answer was simply another gasp, then there was a sob and the clatter of the receiver falling.

I feared that the line would be broken, but her voice came back a few seconds later, even weaker than before.

‘Yes, I saw on the front page that he’d been killed and that a young suspect had been arrested. And I hoped that it wasn’t my Tor, but feared the worst. What a terribly, terribly sad story.’

Just then the pips started indicating that her time was up. So she spoke very quickly. ‘The line will be cut any minute, and I don’t have any more money. We live in a basement flat in thirty-six Tøyenbekken down in Grønland. Come here and I can tell you everything.’

The line was cut before I had the chance to ask her to come here instead.

I sat at my desk for a few seconds and mused on what possible connection there could be between a family from the east end and Per Johan Fredriksen. Judging by the mother’s reaction, there clearly was a connection, and just as we thought, it would be a tragic story.

It took me a couple of minutes to decide whether I should go to see the mother directly or have another talk with her son first. I came to the conclusion that as he was a minor, it was my duty to tell him that his mother would be coming soon and to inform him that we now knew his identity.

The prison guard and I both instinctively took a couple of steps back as the door to the cell swung open.

My first thought was that there had been an earthquake. My second was that the prisoner had somehow managed to escape.

But there had been no earthquake – only a stool that had been pushed over and a bed that had been pulled apart, with the pillow and mattress left lying on the floor.

Tor Johansen was still in the room. He was hanging perfectly still and lifeless against the wall. The bedsheet had been torn into strips and plaited together to make a rope. One end of which was now firmly knotted to the bars on the window, and the other around his neck.

I felt a brief glimmer of hope when I took hold of him, as his body was still warm. But I had come too late. There was no sign of a pulse or breath.

I shouted to the prison guard that he should call a doctor, and heard his running steps disappear down the corridor as I stood there with the lifeless boy in my arms. I had seen death close at hand several times before in the course of my work, but standing here with a dead child in my arms was a horrible experience, all the same. To begin with I thought that I could not let him go until the doctor came. However, no matter how thin he was, he soon became heavy and I realized all hope was gone. So I slowly laid him down on the mattress on the floor.

I stood there and looked at the dead boy’s body for a small eternity before I eventually started to cast my eyes around the room. There was not much to see. His shoes stood neatly just inside the door and he was wearing all his clothes. The only things on the table were a pencil and notebook. And on it, he had written in large, simple capital letters:

BECAUSE EITHER IT IS THE WORLD THAT IS TURNED TO SLAVERY, OR ME… AND IT IS MORE LIKELY TO BE THE LATTER.

I read the note containing Tor Johansen’s last words to the world over and over again, until an out-of-breath doctor arrived and immediately declared the patient dead.

I had no idea where the words on the note came from – or whether indeed it was something he had read or come up with himself. Whatever the case, his note only increased my puzzlement as to who Tor Johansen had been and what he had been thinking.

Number 36 Tøyenbekken was at the very end of the street. The Grønland neighbourhood was far from one of the best in town, the street was far from one of the best in the neighbourhood and the building was far from one of the best in the street. The paint was flaking from the walls, the steps were worn down and what had once been a medium-sized basement flat was now divided into two much smaller homes.

The woman who was waiting for me in the basement also seemed a little worn down. Her dark hair had started to grey, and her cheeks were wet with tears. I guessed that she was closer to fifty than sixty, but it did strike me that not so many decades ago she could well have been an attractive young woman. She was around five foot six and her body appeared slim yet shapely even under her old threadbare dress. The skin on her hands was creased and she was trembling with emotion.

‘Come in,’ she said quickly, and then closed the door behind us.

We went in and sat down in a room that was barely 150 square feet and appeared to be a combined kitchen, living room and bedroom. There was a table and a couple of chairs in the middle of the room, a made-up bed along one wall and a kitchen counter and cooker along the other.

It was half past two. The priest had been there before me. Lene Johansen knew why I was there. I, on the other hand, could still not see a connection.

The room gave me no clues whatsoever. The flat was clean and tidy, if incredibly small. The things I could see were somehow less striking than the things I could not see. I had not expected there to be a television in a basement flat in Grønland, but nor was there a radio or even any newspapers. There was no telephone or wall clock of any kind.

Above the bed, there was a simple old photograph of a couple in their thirties with a small child. The child was too young to be recognizable as Tor Johansen, but the woman was definitely his mother and she had indeed once been beautiful. The man beside her did not make much of an impression. He was just a clean-shaven, thin, dark-haired man. There was no striking resemblance to Tor Johansen, but nor were there any great differences. His smile was unusually broad, and he had his hand on the baby’s head.

The woman followed my eyes to the picture. ‘That was in 1957,’ she said quietly. ‘I was thirty-five, but felt younger and more optimistic than I had done for a long time. We had been married for twelve years without any children, and then all of a sudden, I was going to have one. It was a difficult pregnancy and a complicated birth. We never had any more children. So everything was focused on Tor. In the early days, when he was first born, we thought that everything was fine. But when he started to crawl, we noticed that he dragged one foot behind, and he struggled with words when finally he started to talk. So I had to give all my time to a child who would never learn to walk or talk properly. They were happy days all the same, while my husband was still healthy and alive. He had a good job at the steel works and spent practically everything he earned on the family. But then he fell ill and that same day lost any control over the bottle. Things went downhill with frightening speed. When my husband died three years ago, he left us seventy kroner in cash and twenty-three thousand, two hundred in debt. Since then, Tor and I have moved every year to smaller and smaller flats. And we can’t even manage to stay here now the rent has gone up.’

She pulled from her pocket a folded sheet of paper and placed it on the table in front of me.