At the time of his death, Jens Rune Meier was unmarried. He was a thirty-two-year-old lawyer who lived in Kolsås; a Norwegian citizen from a good middle-class family, but his grandfather had been from Germany, so he had a German surname. It would appear that the occupying forces and the NS had had high hopes for him and, if rumour was to be believed, he was being touted as a possible cabinet minister in Quisling’s government.
Jens Rune Meier glared at me from a black-and-white passport photograph dated autumn 1941, and from a report about the attack in the NS newspaper, Fritt Folk. I sat there for a couple of minutes looking him in the eye without finding the answer as to whether he had been the Dark Prince or not. Following liberation in 1945, no guns were found that in any way resembled the missing 9×19mm calibre Walther pistol. I sat there a little longer musing on where it might be today, as I wrote the short daily report for my boss. The report was not the best I had written, in terms either of language or content. My thoughts were preoccupied with what Patricia might be able to deduce from the new information about the case. In the end, I put the report to one side and drove over to see her a quarter of an hour earlier than agreed.
Patricia listened while we ate the starter and I told her in detail about how Leonard Schelderup was found and the circumstances surrounding his death. She uttered a disapproving ‘hmmh’ several times. And this was clearly not with reference to the delicious vegetable soup.
But she really only got into her stride shortly after the main course had been put on the table and I finally told her about my visit to Petter Johannes Wendelboe. She then became so intensely interested that it took several minutes before she even touched the tenderloin on her plate. I had both expected and hoped that she would show greater interest in Magdalena Schelderup and her wartime fiancé. What instead fascinated Patricia was the chronology of her fiancé’s death and other events that took place within the group.
‘Hans Petter Nilsen was killed on 12 May and Bjørn Varden on 5 September 1941. Magdalon Schelderup joined the Resistance group in the summer of 1941, and the NS member, Jens Rune Meier, was executed at Easter 1942, following Schelderup’s suggestion just before Christmas 1941… The pattern is so striking that I do not for a moment believe that it is coincidence.’
