Authors: Hans Olav Lahlum
The day’s events had also taken their toll on me. I lay there until well past midnight, my mind churning over what had been said, half expecting the telephone to ring again. Then I finally
fell asleep, only to be woken by a very odd nightmare. I imagined that Leonard Schelderup had rung me again and begged for a constable to be put on guard as soon as possible.
At a quarter past two I stumbled over to the telephone, annoyed with myself, and dialled the number of the police station to ask if it would be possible to station a police officer outside
Leonard Schelderup’s flat in Skøyen. I knew that resources were tight and that posting an officer overnight was limited only to exceptional cases of imminent danger. But I suddenly had
the feeling that this was precisely one such extraordinary and dangerous situation. There were a couple of men on duty in case of emergency and they promised that one of them would be outside the
address given in Skøyen by three o’clock. I lay tossing and turning for another ten minutes, castigating myself first for having been overcautious and calling out a policeman in the
middle of the night, and then for not having done it sooner. The alarm clock glowed a quarter past three by the time sleep overpowered my tired brain. I then slept heavily until the morning,
unaware of the drama that had taken place under cover of darkness.
On the Trail of a Lonesome Horseman
I
Tuesday, 13 May 1969 was another day with an early start. My telephone rang at twenty-three minutes to eight, just as I put a cup of coffee down on the breakfast table. When I
answered ‘Kristiansen, how can I help you?’ there was a couple of seconds of heavy breathing on the other end before a woman’s voice pierced my ear.
‘Is that Detective Inspector Kristiansen? If it is, please can you come immediately? There has been another murder.’
The voice was trembling, and yet impressively controlled and clear. I recognized it immediately as one of the voices I had heard at Schelderup Hall. It took a couple of seconds more before I
realized it belonged to Magdalon Schelderup’s former wife, Ingrid. She spoke quickly and was remarkably informative.
‘I am in Skøyen, in my son’s flat. I came to see him this morning, but someone has been here before me. Leonard is lying on the floor with a bullet wound to his head and has
obviously been killed. If you come, you can see for yourself!’
The choice of words was rather odd, but her voice was still impressively clear for a woman who had just found her only son murdered. I vaguely recalled Patricia’s words about the hard and
strong satellite people involved in this case. Then I mumbled my condolences and asked her to stay where she was with the door locked until I got there. She promised to do this, but added that it
was too late to save her son’s life or to catch the murderer.
So Tuesday, 13 May turned into one of the very few days when my breakfast was left untouched on the kitchen table. It took me less than thirty seconds from the time I put down the phone to when
I slammed the front door shut behind me.
The drive to Skøyen, on the other hand, felt incredibly long. I remembered what a great experience it had been to watch Leonard Schelderup sail across the finishing line with rare
majesty, his long fair hair flowing, to win gold in the Norwegian Championships at Bislett the year before. I also remembered only too well his frightened face at the reading of the will, and his
terrified voice on the telephone last night. Now that Leonard Schelderup had in one fell move gone from murder suspect to murder victim, my sympathy welled up.
Alone in the car, I cursed several times the fact that I had not come out to see him last night. For the second time in three days a Schelderup had phoned me and for the second time he had died
before I could speak to him. My only defence was that I had offered to station a policeman outside and he had said no. This time I had even ordered a constable to go there several hours later. But
the facts of the matter were still brutal: Leonard Schelderup had telephoned me yesterday evening to say that he was frightened and this morning he had been shot and killed.
The investigation seemed to be more complicated than ever. I had never truly believed that Leonard Schelderup had murdered his father, but no more than a day ago he had been the only one of the
ten who had stood out as a natural suspect, in addition to Synnøve Jensen. And now that he had become a murder victim himself, it felt as though the mystery was getting deeper, despite the
fall in the number of possible suspects. Apart from Synnøve Jensen, I could not pick out any one of the nine remaining as a more or less likely double murderer than the rest.
The first person I met at the scene of the crime was the constable who had been standing guard. He immediately came forward when he saw me on the pavement outside. He was a down-to-earth, good
police officer who gave a down-to-earth and good report, according to which he had driven here as soon as he had been asked last night and had been standing guard, with a clear view to both sides
of the building, since ten to three in the morning. There had been no sign of life in either of the flats in the building at that point. No one had come or gone from either of them, until an older
lady, who it turned out was the deceased’s mother, had rung the bell at around twenty past seven. The light in the neighbour’s flat had come on at ten past seven, but there was still no
sign of life in Schelderup’s flat by that time.
Thus there was only one clear conclusion, and that was that if Leonard Schelderup had been murdered during the night, the murderer must have done it and left the building before ten to three in
the morning.
Ingrid Schelderup stood patiently by the window in her son’s flat while I talked to the constable. She waited to unlock the door until I rang the bell, but then took only a matter of
seconds.
The first thing I saw when I stepped into the flat was Ingrid Schelderup’s taut face. The second was her pale, shaking right hand, which was pointing to the floor. And the third was a
revolver on the floor where she was pointing. The gun was lying on the carpet just inside the door. With a quick look I could confirm that it was an old Swedish-produced 7.5mm calibre Nagant
revolver.
And so one of the small mysteries was solved. The revolver that had disappeared from Magdalon Schelderup’s cabinet had been found again. But that left another, deeper mystery. And that was
who had taken it from Magdalon Schelderup’s gun collection in Gulleråsen a day or two earlier, presumably with the intention of aiming it at his younger son?
Leonard Schelderup himself was nowhere to be seen in the hallway. He was lying on the floor in the living room beside an armchair that was facing the television. His body was intact, clean and
whole, apart from a bullet wound in his forehead from which the blood had poured freely. One look was enough to confirm that any hope of life was long gone. The flow of blood from the wound had
already started to congeal. I quickly estimated that Leonard Schelderup had died in the early hours of the morning, at the latest, and perhaps even late in the previous evening.
With as much sensitivity as I could, I asked Ingrid Schelderup the one question that I needed an answer to here and now: had she found both the body and the gun exactly where they were lying
now? She dried a tear before answering, but then gave a decisive nod. She had not touched the revolver and she had only gingerly touched her son on the neck and wrist to feel for any sign of life.
The front door was unlocked when she arrived, she told me. When she discovered that, she was almost paralysed by fear. Then she had opened the door and seen the gun without hearing any sounds of
life from the flat and had immediately realized that he had been murdered during the night.
It was easy to draw some conclusions, having looked around the flat. Leonard Schelderup had obviously been shot, presumably with a revolver that someone had stolen from his father’s house
and brazenly left on the floor after the murder. Given Leonard Schelderup’s intense fear the night before, it was unthinkable that he might have forgotten to lock the door before going to
bed. He must therefore have been murdered by a guest who either had a key or whom he had let in. But there was little more to deduce from the scene of the crime. Even if the list of potential
murderers was limited to the nine remaining guests who had been at supper in Schelderup Hall when his father had been murdered two days earlier, it was impossible to exclude any of them.
I looked at Ingrid Schelderup without saying anything. She looked back at me, equally silent. Her eyes were not only sad, but frightened. I got the feeling that we were thinking the same thing.
Namely, that it would seem Leonard Schelderup had been shot in much the same way that members of his late father’s Resistance group had been, but twenty-eight years later.
II
One detail in Leonard Schelderup’s flat quickly caught my attention. The two chairs on opposite sides of the kitchen table did not give away much in themselves, even if he
did live on his own. But the kitchen table was set for two. The coffee cups served to reinforce the impression that young Schelderup had sat here the night before with a guest. When he called me at
around ten o’clock, the guest had not yet arrived, or he had chosen not to tell me. There was not much more to be drawn from it. One of the cups had been used, but the cup and plate on the
other side of the table were untouched. I was fairly convinced that Leonard Schelderup’s guest had been sitting on that side.
However, the most remarkable discovery was in the bedroom. It seemed unlikely that Leonard Schelderup had gone to bed, only to get up again and get dressed before being shot in his living room
in the middle of the night. And yet it would appear that there had been considerable activity in his bed the day before. The pillows and duvet were in a tangle and the sheet was half pulled off the
mattress. It might of course be the case that Leonard Schelderup had simply not made his bed when he got up yesterday morning, but his mother insisted that he was a very tidy and good boy who
always made his bed as soon as he got up. There were no visible physical traces of sexual intercourse on the covers. The crucial proof that someone else had not only been in the flat in the past
twenty-four hours, but also in the bed, lay on the pillow. The forensic team found two curly blond hairs that clearly came from Leonard Schelderup’s head, but also three longer, darker hairs
that were quite obviously not his.
As I stood there looking at the three dark hairs, it seemed to me that the case had now leapt forwards towards a possible solution. I felt a stab of sympathy for the dark-haired Synnøve
Jensen, but the evidence was certainly stacking up against her.
Ingrid Schelderup held her poise and control throughout our conversation and the examination of the flat. But then the tragedy apparently struck her. Sitting alone on the sofa, she suddenly
broke down and collapsed in a sobbing heap. I managed to coax her back up intoa sitting position. It was of course no easy thing to comfort a woman who has just found her only son shot and
murdered. In the end, the constable offered to drive her home and to stay with her until she was given some tranquillizers.
At half past eight, I was sitting on my own in Leonard Schelderup’s flat, with my dead host lying eternally silent and cold on the floor in the living room. My eyes rested on him while I
used his telephone to call the main police station, who promised to send down some more forensic scientists to examine both him and the flat. His body was now finally released from the tension of
the past few days. But his face was tense and frightened, even in death.
I sat there looking at the dead man. There seemed to be no way around it; all circumstances now seemed to point to Synnøve Jensen. Though why she should kill her other lover and fellow
conspirator, if that was what Leonard Schelderup had been, was very unclear. But the hairs on the pillow were a strong indication that that was the case.
III
I did not need to go far to question my first witness. Leonard Schelderup’s neighbour was the obvious starting point and as luck would have it, she was at home.
Halldis Merete Abrahamsen was, in her own words, the seventy-nine-year-old widow of a successful pharmacist. She was well off and her mind and all her senses were still in perfectly good working
order. And I could absolutely believe that. It was also obvious, however, that her social life and horizons had shrunk somewhat since her husband had died and the children had moved out. The
pictures, books and furniture were all those of a woman who spent an increasing amount of time at home, with her thoughts drifting further and further back in time.
This was a sad situation for Halldis Merete Abrahamsen, but very good for the investigation, as she seemed to have developed a keen interest in her neighbours instead. A small pair of binoculars
placed to hand on the windowsill in the kitchen confirmed my suspicions in this regard. And the young Leonard Schelderup held a special position amongst the neighbours. This was due no doubt to the
fact that he lived in the flat next door, but perhaps even more to his name and family fortune. Mrs Abrahamsen proved she had an impressive memory when she rattled off her neighbour’s family
tree and the most recent estimates of the family’s wealth.
‘One still reads the papers and takes an interest in those around one,’ as she put it.
The widow first of all expressed her shock at the news about the ‘handsome young man’s tragic death’, and then proceeded to tell me everything about him. As a neighbour he had
been very considerate and never disturbed her in any way. He left for work early in the morning and often came home late at night, because of his training sessions. Other than his mother, he seldom
had visitors, and on the rare occasions that he did, the guests all left early without making any noise in terms of music or other boisterous behaviour.
She then lowered her voice discreetly and confided in me that a mysterious man had come to see him in the evening several times this autumn. As she remembered him, he was a young, dark-haired
man, but she was a little uncertain of his age as he had a beard, and was wearing a hat and a winter coat with the collar turned up. ‘As if he was doing his best not to be recognized by
anyone. Isn’t that rather odd?’ she added in a whisper. The only thing she could say with any certainty about the guest was that it was a man, and that he was above average height.