Chameleon People (6 page)

Ane Line Fredriksen sighed and rolled her eyes, then lay her arms heavily on the desk as she leaned forwards.

She leaned so far over that I could see the top of her unusually large breasts. However, the story that she told was so sensational that it quickly took all of my attention.

‘When I was eleven and then again when I was sixteen, I noticed a certain tension at home both before and after my parents went out for a mysterious meal. It was just a
few weeks after the second meal that I first heard the story about the murder in 1932. It was Father who started to tell me about it, one Saturday when he had had a few too many drinks. The case
had always plagued him and he had been thinking about it even more in recent years. He said he would happily give ten million kroner to know what had happened. It was obviously a story that he and
Mother both knew very well, but that they had never told us children. My brother and sister had never heard about it either until I told them.’

There was a short, dramatic pause. I waved for her to continue. She flashed me a coquettish smile and then carried on eagerly.

‘Father was the MP for Vestfold. He was born there and was heir to a large estate with half a forest. There were big class differences in Vestfold back then. Our Labour prime minister was
born around the same time only a couple of miles away, but grew up in poverty. Anyway, in March 1932, Father and five other friends from Vestfold went to Oslo for the spring break. They all came
from very wealthy families at a time when there was widespread poverty and need. They had each booked a room at a hotel out by Ullern, which was one of the most desirable parts of town, and
presumed to be a safe area. And yet, something very dramatic happened there. On their second evening at the hotel, the youngest, a twenty-one-year-old woman, called Eva Bjølhaugen, was found
dead in her room. She was found lying on the sofa and there was no visible sign of violence. She suffered from epilepsy and it was assumed that she died as a result of a seizure. But there was no
autopsy. Father was not convinced that that was what had happened at all. There were several things he felt did not fit.’

She stopped and looked at me with teasing eyes, but hurried on obediently when I asked if she could remember what it was her father had doubted. It crossed my mind that we had hit it off
remarkably well, despite being so different.

‘Yes, but unfortunately, he was more secretive about that. The strangest thing was the key, he said. The door to the hotel room was locked, but the key was lying on the floor out in the
corridor. And apparently the woman only suffered from petit mal. But there were a few other things that were odd about the whole affair. Father, who was otherwise not prone to being abstract,
became remarkably vague when he talked about it. It could as easily be suicide or murder, as epilepsy, he said.’

The story had piqued my interest now. I hastened to ask if she knew who else had been there.

‘Apart from my father and the young Eva Bjølhaugen, her boyfriend and sister were there. There was also the young woman whom Father was engaged to at the time, and another friend.
So there were three young men and three young women, two couples and one set of siblings. Plenty of opportunity for romance and jealousy there, I reckon. From what I understood, Father and his
fiancée broke up soon afterwards.’

‘How strange that there was no autopsy,’ I said.

She nodded eagerly. ‘That is what I thought. Father simply said that there was no autopsy.’

‘And the restaurant visits – where do they fit in?’

Just then, the phone on my desk started to ring. I hoped that it might be information about the suspect’s identity, and answered immediately. I was becoming so focused on the case that it
was almost a disappointment to hear Miriam’s voice at the other end.

‘Hi. I just wondered if half past four was still a realistic time to meet, or if we should make it later? I’m sure you’re having a busy day, and I should probably study a
little more to prepare for the exam,’ she said.

Miriam still had two and a half months left until the exam. However, her ambitious perfectionism meant that she pretended to have only two weeks left when, in fact, there were two months, and
that she only had two days left when it was actually two weeks. I saw no reason to discuss this here and now, and was without a doubt having a busy day. So I gave it five seconds’ thought and
suggested that we meet at the Theatre Cafe for supper at half past six.

‘Deal,’ she said, and put the phone down.

‘Apologies, I had to arrange supper with my fiancée,’ I said.

To my disappointment, I saw no disappointment in Ane Line’s eyes, only greater curiosity. She opened her mouth to say something, almost certainly to ask about my fiancée, but I just
managed to pip her to the post.

‘Now, where were we? Yes, the meals that the group from 1932 had are more relevant to the case than my own dinner plans.’

‘Yes, they really are quite something, which only underlines how serious the situation was. The other five from the group who were in Oslo in 1932 continued to meet every five years to
mark the day that Eva Bjølhaugen died, at the restaurant of the same hotel. They all hoped that someone might say something that would throw light on the tragedy, Father said, but that never
happened.’

‘But, if they met every five years and that was in March 1932 . . .’

Ane Line nodded eagerly again. ‘The date was the fifth of March 1932. So the five last met just a couple of weeks ago. It is rather odd, isn’t it?’

She looked up at me from under her red fringe with bright enthusiastic eyes. I nodded with equal enthusiasm. I still could not see any connection between the forty-year-old mystery and the
stabbing of Per Johan Fredriksen on a street in Oslo yesterday. My gut feeling told me that there was some kind of link, but my head could not work out what.

‘Very interesting. I will see what I can find about the case in our archives. Do you know if your father had any contact with the four others from 1932 in between these restaurant
visits?’

Ane Line smiled again. ‘Well, I know that he certainly had regular contact with one of them. I don’t even know the names of the other three, so I couldn’t say whether he had
contact with them or not. But if you find their names in the archives, I’d be more than happy to answer that.’

Ane Line Fredriksen was clearly more curious than most. And her eagerness and openness were contagious. I picked up my pen to write down the name of the one person that her father had had
regular contact with. And then promptly dropped it in shock when the redhead exclaimed: ‘Oda Fredriksen! Eva Bjølhaugen was my mother’s little sister.’

We sat and stared at each other for a few seconds. It seemed to me that she was almost teasing me, and enjoying it, despite her father’s death and the gravity of the situation.

‘So let me get this straight: three young men and three young women went to Oslo together in 1932. The young Eva Bjølhaugen, who was the girlfriend of one of the men, was found dead
in her locked hotel room in circumstances that have never been clarified. Your father was engaged to one of the other women, but later married Eva Bjølhaugen’s sister?’

She nodded energetically. ‘Exactly. And it didn’t take long either – Mother and Father got married just eighteen months later. And the five from the group who are still alive
have met every five years since, most recently a couple of weeks before my father was killed. Surely that can’t be a coincidence?’

I was open about what I thought: that it could, of course, be a coincidence, but that I very much doubted that it was.

‘Exactly,’ she said, her eyes shining.

As things seemed to be going so well, I took the chance to ask what else her father and mother had told them about this strange old story.

‘Not very much, unfortunately. My father was a kind man, but was quick to put things off. Even when we’ve argued about money in recent years, he has never been mean or harsh with us,
just evasive. This old story bothered him a great deal and he did not want to talk about it. I pushed him a couple of times, but he just said that we could perhaps talk about it later. That never
happened, of course. Mother was more cagey than Father and completely clammed up when I tried to talk to her about it. She just said that both she and my father had been there, and that they both
still wondered what had actually happened, and that it had been extremely painful to lose her only sister like that. I could never get any more out of her. You should ask her about it, she has to
tell you now, even if she didn’t want to tell me before.’

I nodded thoughtfully. Then I thanked her for the interesting conversation and asked if I could contact her again once I had looked up the case in the archives. She immediately offered to wait
in my office while I looked through the file. We compromised, and she waited outside while I read through the case.

The file from 1932 was disappointingly thin. Initially, it had been marked ‘suspicious death’ and then changed to ‘no case to answer’. My attention was
immediately drawn to a couple of photographs of the young woman on a dark velvet sofa. As far as I could see, the woman showed no physical signs of violence or illness of any sort, and was just
lying there peacefully, as though asleep. She was slightly shorter than the sofa and had long blonde hair and pale skin. Her body was well shaped, almost like a statue. The photographs made me
think of Sleeping Beauty. But Eva Bjølhaugen, born in Sande on 7 January 1911, had never woken up from her deep sleep.

I sat there with the forty-year-old photographs and mused on what secrets she had taken with her to the grave, and what significance they might have for yesterday’s murder.

The reports and statements told me in short that Eva Bjølhaugen had been last seen alive by her boyfriend and four other friends at around five o’clock in the afternoon of 5 March
1932, when she had let herself into her room following a trip into town. And she was found dead in Room 111 at Haraldsen’s Hotel in Ullern at a quarter past eight that very evening. She had
arranged to meet the others for dinner at eight o’clock. They had all met in the lobby at the agreed time, and realized that something was wrong when she failed to show up by ten past
eight.

Her boyfriend, Hauk Rebne Westgaard, had gone to look for her. Then at twelve minutes past eight he had come back to the others in the lobby. He had told them that the door to her room was
locked and he had heard no sign of life when he knocked. Her boyfriend’s concern only increased when he found the key to her door lying on the floor in the corridor, outside his own room.

In his statement, Hauk Rebne Westgaard said that he had been extremely worried about his girlfriend and did not want to enter her room alone. So he ran down to the others and they all entered
the room at precisely a quarter past eight to find Eva Bjølhaugen dead on the sofa.

Eva Bjølhaugen’s bed had obviously been used after it had been made up in the morning. But her five companions agreed that there was no sign that anyone else had been there. And the
police found no evidence of this either, though they did find fingerprints of all five young people in the room. This was not seen to be suspicious, of course, as they had all been there after she
had died, and had also been in there together the evening before. None of them had noticed anything different about Eva Bjølhaugen. She had been in a good mood earlier in the day and
generally had an optimistic outlook on life. She had finished school with good grades and had talked about studying languages at the University of Oslo. It was clearly stated in the report that
there was ‘no history of depression’.

The rest of the group had stayed in rooms on the same corridor. A certified transcript of the reception book documented the following:

The bed in Room 111 had been used after it had been made up in the morning, but according to the police there was no technical evidence of sexual activity.

The deceased’s suitcase was in a corner of the room, but only contained two extra sets of clothes, a pair of shoes and three women’s magazines. There was a glass, a toothbrush and a
tube of toothpaste in the bathroom, as well as a dressing gown, two used towels from the hotel, and some make-up. It appeared that nothing had been stolen from the room, and Eva’s purse with
almost one hundred kroner in cash was still in her coat pocket. The only thing one might expect to find in the room that was not there was the key. The police report confirmed, without any further
speculation, that it had been found on the floor outside Room 114.

None of the deceased’s friends said they had heard anything from her room or any of the other rooms in the few hours before she was found dead. The only exception was that Solveig Thaulow
said she heard a muffled bang or thump at around half past seven. However, she was not able to say where it came from or what kind of noise it could have been. The deceased’s boyfriend
suspected that she might have been strangled or suffocated, possibly with the help of a pillow. However, there were no marks on her neck and there was no saliva or other bodily fluid on any
pillow.

The assumed cause of death was given in the end as ‘epileptic fit’. There was a short statement to say that, according to the deceased’s sister and parents, she suffered from
epilepsy, and from the doctor’s initial findings, it seemed that she had had an epileptic fit that afternoon. Her sister Oda Bjølhaugen was very shaken and immediately demanded an
autopsy. But when their parents arrived later that night, they asked if it would be possible not to have an autopsy, as it would only cause more distress for the family in a situation where
everything indicated natural causes. Their daughter had ‘very reluctantly’ agreed to this in the end, and the police had done as the family requested. Thus there was no confirmation of
the time and cause of death.