Jo Nesbo - The Redbreast

'I think you know a great deal, anyway, herr Juul.'

'Is that right?'

I think you know what I mean. My research has been very thorough.'

Juul sucked on his pipe and looked at Harry. In the silence that followed Harry became aware that someone was standing in the sitting-room doorway. He turned and saw an elderly woman. Her gentle, calm eyes were looking at Harry.

'We're just having a chat, Signe,' Even Juul said.

She gave Harry a cheery nod, opened her mouth as if to say something, but stopped when her eyes met Even Juul's. She nodded again, quietly closed the door and was gone.

'So you know?' Juul asked.

'Yes. She was a nurse on the Eastern Front, wasn't she?'

'By Leningrad. From 1942 to the retreat in March of 1944.' He put down his pipe. 'Why are you hunting this man?'

'To be honest, we don't know that, either. But there might be an assassination brewing.'

'Hm.'

'So what should we look for? An oddball? A man who's still a committed Nazi? A criminal?' Juul shook his head.

'Most of the men at the front served their sentence and then slipped back into society. Many of them made out surprisingly well, even after being branded traitors. Not so surprising maybe. It often turns out that the gifted ones are those who make decisions in critical situations like war.'

'So the person we're looking for may well be one of those who did alright for himself.' Absolutely.'

'A pillar of society?'

'The door to positions of national importance in finance and politics would probably have been closed to him.'

'But he could have been an independent businessman, an entrepreneur. Definitely someone who has earned enough money to buy a weapon for half a million. Who could he possibly be after?'

'Does this necessarily have anything to do with his having fought at the front?'

'I have a sneaking feeling it might.'

A motive for revenge then?'

'Is that so unreasonable?'

'No, not at all. Many men from the front see themselves as the real patriots in the war. They think that, given the way the world looked in 1940, they acted in the best interests of the nation. They consider the fact that we sentenced them as traitors to be a total travesty of justice.'

'So?'

Juul scratched behind his ear.

'Well. The judges involved in bringing them to justice are by and large dead now. And the same is true of the politicians who laid the basis for the trials. The revenge theory seems thin.'

Harry sighed. 'You're right. I'm only trying to form a picture with the few pieces of the puzzle I have.'

Juul glanced quickly at his watch. 'I promise I'll give it some thought, but I really don't know if I can help you.'

'Thanks anyway,' Harry said, getting up. Then he remembered something and pulled out a pile of folded sheets of paper from his jacket pocket.

'By the way, I took a copy of my report of the interview with a witness in Johannesburg. If you could have a look to see whether there's anything of significance in it?'

Juul said yes, but shook his head as if meaning no.

As Harry was putting on his shoes in the hall, he pointed to the photograph of the man in the white coat.

'Is that you?'

'In the first half of the previous century, yes,' Juul laughed. 'It was taken in Germany before the war. I was supposed to follow in my father's and grandfather's footsteps and study medicine there. When the war broke out I made my way home and in fact got my hands on my first history books on the boat. After that it was too late: I was hooked.'

'So you gave up medicine?'

'Depends on how you look at it. I wanted to try to find an explanation of how one man and one ideology could bewitch so many people. And perhaps find an antidote, too.' He laughed. I was very, very young.'

First Floor, Continental Hotel. 1 March 2000.

'Nice that we could meet like this,' Bernt Brandhaug said, raising his wineglass.

They toasted and Aud Hilde smiled at the Under Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

'And not only on official business,' he said, holding her gaze until she looked down. Brandhaug studied her. She wasn't exactly attractive, her features were a little too coarse for that and she was certainly plump, but she had a charming, flirty way about her and she was young plump.

She had rung him from the staff office this morning saying they needed his advice on an unusual case, but before she could say any more he had asked her up to his office. And when she was there he had immediately decided he didn't have the time and they could discuss it over a meal after work.

'We civil servants should also have a few perks,' he had said. She presumed he meant the meal.

So far everything had gone well. The head waiter had given them Brandhaug's regular table and, to the best of his knowledge, there was no one he knew in the room.

'Yes, there's this strange case we had yesterday,' she said, letting the waiter unfold the napkin over her lap. 'We had a visit from an elderly man who maintained that we owed him money. The Foreign Office, that is. Almost two million kroner, he said, referring to a letter he had sent in 1970.'

She rolled her eyes. She shouldn't wear so much make-up, Brandhaug thought.

'So what did we owe him money for?'

'He said he was a merchant seaman during the war. It was something to do with Nortraship. They had withheld his pay.'

'Oh, yes, I think I know what it was about. What else did he say?'

'That he couldn't wait any longer. That we had cheated him and all the other merchant seamen. God would punish us for our sins. I don't know if he had been drinking or he was ill, but he looked under the weather. He brought a letter with him, signed by the Norwegian Consul General in Bombay in 1944, who guaranteed, on behalf of the Norwegian state, the back payment of the war-risk bonus for four years' service as an officer in the Norwegian merchant navy. Had it not been for the letter, we would have just given him the heave-ho of course, and we wouldn't have bothered you with this trivial matter.'

'You can come to me any time you wish, Aud Hilde,' he said, with a sudden stab of panic: her name was Aud Hilde, wasn't it?

'Poor man,' Brandhaug said, gesturing to the waiter to bring more wine. 'The sad thing about this case is that he is actually right. Nortraship was established to administer the boats in the merchant fleet that the Germans had not already captured. It was an organisation with partly political and partly commercial interests. The British, for example, paid large sums in risk bonuses to Nortraship to use Norwegian shipping. But the money, instead of being used to pay the crews, went straight into the ship-owners' pockets and the state's coffers. We're talking about several hundred million kroner here. The merchant seamen tried to get their money back through legal proceedings, but they lost their case in the Supreme Court in 1954. The Storting passed an act in 1972, establishing that merchant seamen had a right to this money.'

'This man doesn't seem to have received anything. Because he was in the China Sea and was torpedoed by the Japanese and not by the Germans, he said.'

'Did he say what his name was?'

'Konrad Asnes. Wait a moment and I'll show you the letter. He had worked out how much was owed with compound interest.'

She bent to look in her bag. Her upper arms quivered. She should do a bit more exercise, Brandhaug thought. Four kilos less and Aud Hilde would simply be well-rounded instead of… fat.

'It's alright,' he said. 'I don't need to see it. Nortraship comes under the Ministry of Commerce.'

She looked up at him.

'He insisted we were the ones who owed him the money. He gave us a deadline of two weeks.' Brandhaug laughed.

'Did he? And what's the rush now, after sixty years?'