Hans Lahlum: The Human Flies

When telling me about himself, Darrell Williams explained that his slightly unusual Christian name was due to his Irish ancestry. His grandparents had emigrated to the United States in the 1870s, following the Great Famine. He himself was born and raised in New York, and was the son of a well-known lawyer. Darrell Williams had given up his own law degree in order to sign up for military service after America joined the war, and took part in the Normandy landings in the summer of 1944. The following year, he had come to Norway just after its liberation as a young lieutenant in the US delegation. He soon found himself a Norwegian girlfriend and a post in the American military mission and stayed on in Norway until the spring of 1948. He had learned Norwegian back then and had so many fond memories from that time that he had, nearly twenty years later, applied for a vacant position as attaché at the embassy in Oslo when the opportunity arose. In the intervening years, he had pursued a career in the military and risen to the rank of major, before making the switch to diplomacy in the early 1960s.

In answer to my question regarding his civil status, Darrell Williams’s smile was relaxed and full of self-irony.

‘I got married in the USA in 1951, but the high point of the marriage was when we split up three years later. It resulted in too many arguments and no children. My wife claimed that she left me for a certain man, which would appear to be untrue as she then went on to marry someone else, and to have a child with yet another man!’

The diplomat spoke openly of his disastrous marriage. As a single man with no children, the diplomatic service had allowed him to fulfil his childhood dream of seeing more of Asia and Europe. Over the past decade he had been posted to a number of embassies, but could, ‘with his hand on his heart’, honestly say that he had never seen a capital as beautiful as Oslo.

The embassy had both organized and paid for the flat. And Darrell Williams had no complaints about it, only that due to long working hours and official dinners, he was not here very much, so he did not know the other people in the building particularly well. Williams thought the caretaker and his wife to be ‘orderly and helpful’. The handicapped man on the ground floor was ‘a very cultured and friendly man’ who spoke good English and could discuss Jack London and his other favourite American authors. The young Swedish student also seemed to be ‘nice and knowledgeable’ in the few conversations that Williams had had with her. The taxi driver on the ground floor was a perhaps ‘a simple soul’ and kept a very low profile, but he was interested in football and other sport, so Williams exchanged the odd word with him now and then. They had stopped for a chat about the forthcoming Norwegian Cup game when they bumped into each other by the stairs on the night of the murder.

The American had barely spoken to the young couple on the first floor, so only confirmed that they seemed to be ‘unusually happy and full of the joys of life, even for newly-weds’. On the night of the murder, Kristian Lund had swung through the front door only a few steps ahead of him. Williams had touched his hat, as was his wont, and received a friendly ‘good evening’ in return. That was about the extent of the contact between them: brief but never unfriendly.

Darrell Williams remembered Harald Olesen’s name well from the years 1945 to 1946 and had been quite excited by the fact that he now lived in the same building. Shortly after he had moved in, he had taken the opportunity to knock on his neighbour’s door and was well received. But during his visit and on a couple of later occasions, Williams got the impression that something or other was weighing on Olesen’s mind and he did not wish to burden him further. Olesen had continued to greet him with a friendly smile all the same. However, it had struck Williams more than once that the old war hero was becoming an increasingly isolated and dejected old man.

Williams had not seen Olesen alive on the day of the murder. He had been to a dinner party and did not come home until around eight. After his evening stroll, he had been talking to Konrad Jensen on the stairs for a few minutes when they suddenly heard a gunshot on the second floor. Williams had instinctively started to run up the stairs, with Jensen at his heels. They did not meet anyone on the stairs, nor did they see anyone else in the hallway when they reached the second floor. They rang on Olesen’s doorbell several times without any response. A minute or two later, Kristian Lund had also appeared, closely followed by the caretaker’s wife. The caretaker’s wife had then gone back down to get her keys and to call the police, as they had not heard a sound inside the flat. While she was doing this, Gullestad had come up in the lift. The five of them had discussed whether or not they should open the door, but had agreed to wait until the police arrived. They neither heard nor saw any signs of an intruder in the building, and it was not possible that anyone could have sneaked past them.

Williams could not recall ever seeing a blue raincoat in 25 Krebs’ Street, not on the day of the murder or previously. He responded openly and honestly to my question regarding firearms: ‘I had a.44-calibre Colt revolver and a.36-calibre pistol with me when I came to Norway, but everything seemed to be so safe here that I sent them both back to my home in the USA a few weeks ago now.’

Strictly speaking, he did not have a licence, but I saw little reason there and then to pester a man with an American diplomat’s passport with minor details such as that. The house search the evening before had shown that Williams, like all the other residents, did not have a gun in the building on the night of the murder. But all the same this did not strike him from the list of possible suspects.

Sara Sundqvist proved to be a slim and unusually tall young woman who waited for a moment or two before opening the door and then kept the safety chain on until she saw my uniform. Despite being around five foot eleven, she could not weigh much over nine stone. I felt that her wrists and arms could snap at any moment, but despite her dangerously tiny waist, her figure was in proportion and her bearing elegant. And even though her expression was drawn and anxious, one could not help but notice her feminine curves. The apparently demure and high-necked green dress only served to emphasize a pair of shapely breasts.

Sara Sundqvist was very serious and slightly shaken by the murder, but still struck me as being sensible and trustworthy. She spoke grammatically correct Norwegian, albeit with a gentle Swedish accent. She gave Gothenburg as her hometown, and her age as twenty-four. She had come to Oslo to study English and philosophy the previous August, and had found the flat through a newspaper advertisement posted by the owner. She used her Swedish student grant and money from her parents to pay for the rent, but also worked in the university library a few hours a week in addition to her studies.

Otherwise, Sara Sundqvist told me that she spent the bulk of her days studying, but did do some amateur dramatics in her free time. She generally went out very little in the evenings. And on the evening in question, she had been at home alone and was in the kitchen making her evening coffee when the gunshot rang out. She had heard it clearly, but thought that perhaps something had fallen onto the floor. She was later frightened by the commotion out in the hall and had decided that it was safest to remain locked in her flat until the police knocked on the door. Although she had not seen any of the drama herself, it had been ‘an extremely frightening experience’. In line with her statement from the evening before, she said that she had not left the flat after she came home at a quarter past four.