Miriam Filtvedt Bentsen quickly proved to have a considerably more nuanced view of Falko Reinhardt than the others who had been at the cabin when he disappeared. She agreed that he was an extremely intelligent and charismatic person, and obviously also very well read. He was perhaps one of the best linguists she had ever met. As a socialist, however, he was both too simplistic and too egoistic, and the group had acted too much like a personal fan club and too little like a political work group. The leader of the group was, according to Miriam, ‘one of those people who believed that the road was built because he started his car’.
Also, if Falko Reinhardt was a genius, he was a very distracted genius, according to Miriam Filtvedt Bentsen. She commented with a more sadistic than sympathetic tinkle of laughter that he often wrote lists about things, but the problems were rarely solved as he then forgot where he had put the lists.
In addition, Miriam Filtvedt Bentsen thought that when they were at the cabin, and in the weeks leading up to the trip, Falko had been troubled by something, but she did not know whether it was political or personal. She had on one occasion asked him outright, but he had not wanted to answer.
As for Marie Morgenstierne, Miriam Filtvedt Bentsen considered her a sensible and philosophical young woman who, ‘like far too many other young women today’, had lived in the shadow of her boyfriend. However, she thought that the relationship between Falko and Marie had been good up to the point of his disappearance. Miriam Filtvedt Bentsen had never met Marie Morgenstierne’s parents, nor Falko Reinhardt’s – or certainly not as far as she knew, she added with a mildly ironic smile. She had had regular contact with Marie herself until the split in spring 1969, after which they had never spoken again.
Marie Morgenstierne was, in Miriam Filtvedt Bentsen’s opinion, generally careful and considerate in what she said about others. She had, however, on one occasion after a couple of glasses of wine, intimated that she suspected that one of the other members of the group knew something about Falko’s disappearance. But when Miriam tried to follow this up, Marie had swiftly backtracked, and neither of them ever mentioned it again.
All contact was broken after spring 1969. Miriam knew nothing about what Marie had done in the intervening eighteen months, and she therefore feared that she would not be of much help to the murder investigation.
