Satellite People | страница 140

After I had arranged for a policeman to go to his house, I sat there deep in thought. It was not hard to understand that Fredrik Schelderup was under enormous stress following the murders of his father and brother. But it felt as though I had seen a glimpse of another even more egotistical and slightly less jolly Fredrik Schelderup on the phone. All of the nine remaining guests from Magdalon Schelderup’s last supper had now been informed about the missing key ring. They had all denied any knowledge of its whereabouts. It seemed highly improbable that none of them knew. But when I eventually went to sleep around midnight on Wednesday, 14 May 1969, I was no closer to knowing who of the nine had the keys and what they planned to do with them.

My start to Thursday, 15 May 1969 was certainly far from the best. I had scarcely got into the office before the phone began to ring. It was my boss, who asked me to come to his office immediately. I knew straight away that something was wrong. As 17 May was Norway’s constitution day, the day’s newspapers were, in preparation for the national holiday, dominated by advance reports about the launch of Apollo 10 in the USA and the launch of Thor Heyerdahl’s Ra expedition in Morocco. The short, concerned notices that stated there were still no developments in the ‘difficult and important’ investigation into the murders of ‘multi-millionaire Magdalon Schelderup and athletics star Leonard Schelderup’ did, however, warn that a possible media storm might be brewing.

Even though my boss was in the better of his two possible moods, this was, as anticipated, not a pleasant conversation. I understood that he and the rest of the station were, following the murder of Leonard Schelderup, under mounting pressure to get some concrete results. This in turn meant that there were others internally who were also increasingly impatient to have the case solved. The question as to whether there was anything new to report was therefore becoming urgent. If there was still nothing concrete, then there might be a need to increase the number of people involved in the investigation.

I told him the truth, that nothing decisive was imminent in the form of an arrest or the like, but that the investigation had made a number of important breakthroughs and that there was every reason to hope that both the cases would be solved soon. Yesterday’s written report was hastily supplemented with some of Patricia’s conclusions, without mentioning her name or the fact that I had been to see her, of course.