Aftenposten and Arbeiderbladet both carried a matter-of-fact report about Marie Morgenstierne’s death at Smestad. Both papers had found out that ‘the well-known Detective Inspector Kolbjørn Kristiansen’ had been given responsibility for the investigation and Aftenposten had, ‘based on previous experience, every hope that the case would be solved and those responsible arrested within a week’.
I put the papers to one side and set off for Kjelsås to start my working day. I still harboured a small hope that the flat where Marie Morgenstierne had lived might contain something to reveal the identity of her murderer.
Getting in proved to be no problem at all. One of the keys from Marie Morgenstierne’s wallet fitted the outside door. The caretaker was at his post and had read about the murder – and about me – in the newspaper, so immediately jumped up when I knocked on the door to his flat on the ground floor. He confirmed that the other key from Marie Morgenstierne’s wallet was to her flat. The only real challenge was to stop him coming in with me. In the end I managed to solve this by promising to come and get him if he could be of any help. He stayed outside the door just in case.
Once inside, my greatest problem was finding anything of any relevance in the flat. All my hopes were initially thwarted. Marie Morgenstierne had apparently been a tidy tenant, and there was not much of a personal touch in the flat. There were a couple of rather traditional paintings on the walls and three framed photographs of her and Falko, including an engagement picture, on the chest of drawers. Otherwise it seemed to be an entirely functional flat. Everything one expected to find in a single woman’s flat was neatly in place here – and nothing more.
Marie Morgenstierne had a bookshelf full of textbooks on politics and other political literature, including a series of selected works by Marx and Engels. And she had a respectable number of literary works on another bookshelf. She had a fair amount of clothes in the wardrobe in the bedroom, but less make-up in the bathroom than one might expect to find for a young woman of her age. There was no form of contraception anywhere, nor any other indication that she had a new boyfriend or lover in her life. Nor were there any personal letters or diaries that might cast light on the case. In short, there was absolutely nothing to point me in the direction of who it might have been who had shot the woman who lived here two days ago.
