When I left Mona Varden at around four o’clock, it was clear to me, given the day’s findings, that I should pay another visit to one of the parties. It would be impossible to finish the day without having confronted Hans Herlofsen with the new information, in particular the piece of paper from Arild Bratberg’s flat. I stopped by the office to see if there was anything new there.
Most of the staff had gone home for the day and, as I expected and feared, there were no new messages from the forensic department.
There was something that caught my attention, however, waiting all alone on my desk. It was a small, slim envelope addressed to ‘The head of the investigation into the murder of Magdalon Schelderup’.
The typeface was the same as the letter that I had received the day after Magdalon Schelderup’s death. This envelope also contained a single sheet of white paper. However the text was even shorter this time.
Here, now.
So one of the dictator’s children has gone.
More may follow, if you do not soon find out which of us is doing wrong…
I sat there staring at the piece of paper. Patricia’s preliminary conclusions about the first letter were certainly reinforced by the second. If the sender really was the murderer, he or she was without doubt a mediocre poet who for some reason or other felt the need to show off to the police.
But I was unable to glean any more than that from the brief letter. And there was one obvious and disturbing conclusion: that more dramatic deaths were to be expected.
The sender had, reasonably enough, not signed this letter either. I made a photostat copy of it and sent the original to be checked for fingerprints – without any high hopes. With the naked eye, I could see that it was the same type of envelope, addressed in the same way as the last letter.
But there was one small, strange difference. Whereas the back of the last envelope had been white and unblemished, I discovered a tiny mark from a green pen on this one. It was a straight line, not even an inch long. But somehow I could not bring myself to believe it was accidental. In a peculiar way that I could not even explain to myself, the short green line only increased my confusion and concern about future developments in the case.
