Hans Lahlum - Chameleon People

I shook my head and told her briefly what we knew about the cause of death. Her whole body trembled and she held her hands to her eyes as I spoke.

‘My sweet Vera, who was so frightened of water and was thirteen before she even dared to swim – and she drowned in the end. But you are not able to tell me who killed her yet, are you?’

Her voice was weak, yet tense. I had to tell her that I could not at present, but that we were working as fast as we could on the case and that I had some questions to ask her concerning it.

‘Yes, of course. Ask away, and I will answer,’ she said, and once again she looked at me with oddly ambivalent eyes.

I started by asking when she had last seen or spoken to her daughter. Her face did not relax any for my question.

‘Sadly, the truth is that I did not even speak to my daughter on the day she died. I slept late yesterday. She had already gone out when I got up at half past ten. She had left a note on the kitchen table to say that she had gone out and would probably not be home until the evening. I thought she had gone to see a friend or to the university. And I did not hear anything from her until the priest came to tell me she was dead. The last time I saw my younger daughter was the evening before. We sat here in the drawing room, all four of us, talking about the future now that Per Johan had died. Vera thought we should sell the businesses to Ramdal, and came out with a couple of confused sentences about how important art and her boyfriend were to her now. Otherwise she did not say much.’

My next question for Oda Fredriksen was naturally whether she believed that her daughter’s boyfriend might have anything to do with the case. This provoked a scornful smile.

‘You will have to rule him out, I’m afraid. He travelled to Paris last Thursday to see a friend’s exhibition, and is still there. I actually sent him a telegram yesterday to let him know about Vera’s death in a respectable manner. Just a moment, I will show you the reply I got today.’

She got up and walked across the floor on light feet, almost without a sound, to the bookshelves. Then she came back with a telegram that she passed to me without even looking at it.

I could understand her irritation when I read the telegram myself. The text was short and still managed to be shocking.

‘Devastated by the news and loss of my true love. Hope I will receive inheritance to realize our great dream. Know she would want that.’

‘But that is not going to happen, is it?’ I said and looked at her.

She shook her head angrily. Her displeasure with her daughter’s boyfriend had pulled her back and she was now fully present in the room.

‘Absolutely not. They were not even engaged, and Vera had not written any kind of will. Her share of the inheritance will be divided between her brother and sister, and neither of them will give her charlatan of a boyfriend so much as a krone. We have already discussed this.’

The picture was clear. Vera Fredriksen’s boyfriend had not been in the country, and what is more, did not have a motive. His motive for falling in love appeared to have been a financial gain that he would not now get as his girlfriend had died.

I noted down the name so that I could confirm with the French police that he was in France, but did not hope for much help from those quarters.

Then I said, as tactfully as I could, that at this point I had to check the alibis of all the members of the family.

She took this unexpectedly well.

‘If you think that I first killed my husband to hide the forty-year-old murder of my sister, and have then murdered my daughter to hide the murder of my husband – well, I hope you understand that that feels rather absurd and unjust. I know that you have to ask, and as far as my husband is concerned, the answer is easy. I was at a party at my cousin’s in Holmenkollen when I received the telephone call about his death, and had been there for several hours. As far as my daughter’s death is concerned, I was here yesterday. It might not be so easy to prove. It depends on when my daughter died. Can you tell me?’

I of course knew that it must have happened between half past three and half past four, but said that we were still waiting for the final autopsy report to confirm the time of death. In the meantime, I asked her to tell me as precisely as

possible the times in the afternoon for which she had an alibi.

‘Well, let me see… there were several flower deliveries that I had to sign for, the first came around midday and the last was delivered just after three. I rang my eldest daughter at around half past three and then again at five.’

I quickly noted that, based on this, the mother seemed to be an unlikely murderer and that she could not have been the mysterious hotel guest, but that she did still lack an alibi for the time frame in which her youngest daughter was murdered.

I asked if she had also tried to ring her son. She nodded thoughtfully.

‘Yes. I rang my son three times – the first time after I had called my eldest daughter at half past three, then around four, and then again at half past four. But there was no answer until around half past five. I can guarantee that he is also innocent. Johan could never do such a thing. But I understand that you are obliged to check his movements too as a matter of procedure.’

I felt a tension rising in my body. There might be many good reasons why Johan Fredriksen had not answered the telephone. But it was certainly worth finding out, especially in a situation where his little sister’s death had earned him roughly ten million kroner.

I said to his mother that no doubt there was a natural explanation, but that I was duty-bound to enquire.

I then added quickly that I was also obliged to check out whether any of Per Johan Fredriksen’s former mistresses might have anything to do with the case, and so I had to ask if she knew who some of them were.

She let out a heavy sigh. ‘Not really. I wanted to know as little as possible about them. My greatest fear has always been that he has an illegitimate child somewhere, but so far there has been no evidence of that. His mistresses were not exactly something we discussed at the dinner table. But I could always see it in my husband. He was more distant and less interested in me for periods. There was a period in the mid-fifties, just after Vera had been born, when he acted this way for a long, long time, and I was worried that I might actually be losing him to another woman. But it passed and faded towards the end of 1956 and the start of 1957. I never found out who it was. But I do have a dreadful suspicion…’

She suddenly pursed her lips and sat in silence for a while. I asked her to please finish what she was saying, and to let me decide whether it was of importance to the case or not.

‘Well, I would rather not spread rumours about others. My husband was not loose-tongued and wasn’t usually a sleep-talker. But one night in the autumn of 1955, when he had a fever, he suddenly started uttering words in his sleep. I couldn’t make out much of it, but several times he clearly said my name and the name of a woman I know. It may of course be a coincidence, but it was strange all the same.’

She fell silent again, then took a deep breath. It was clear that it was difficult for her to talk about this. It was while I sat there watching her struggle to find the words that I understood the connection.

‘Can I hazard a guess that the name he said was Solveig?’

Oda Fredriksen sighed heavily – grimly, in fact. Suddenly she looked old and bitter.

‘Yes, it was. It was as though a ghost from the distant past had appeared in our bedroom. I remember that it felt like the bed under me froze to ice when he said her name, and it was still hard to sit beside her at the dinner nearly two years later. If it really was her he was dreaming about, I never heard anything more. And then things returned to normal a year or so later, and everything was better. Until the one in Majorstuen appeared a couple of years ago, like a snake in paradise, just when I thought my husband was finally done with other women.’