Fredrik was the only child from a deeply unhappy marriage, which ended in a bitter divorce just before the war. Fredrik’s mother was a Christian and had very much enjoyed being ‘the Queen of Gulleråsen’ at Schelderup Hall. She was strongly opposed to divorce, but her husband had found someone else and eventually threw his first wife out of the house, ‘almost physically’. Fredrik had stayed with his father for several years after the divorce, ‘for reasons of pure ease’, but had then suddenly found it ‘more comfortable’ to move into his own flat once he had finished school. His mother did not suffer financially, but she never really recovered from the divorce. Nicotine and alcohol had both contributed to a permanent deterioration in her health, and she died of liver failure at the age of forty-nine.
With regard to his relationship with other members of the family, Fredrik Schelderup now declared that he liked his father’s second wife marginally more than the third, but that he had never had much contact with either of them. In terms of the rest of the family, he tended generally to have the warmest feelings for his eleven-year-younger half-brother. They had grown closer when his brother entered puberty and had himself become the child of divorced parents. But any contact was still sporadic. They were very different, and his brother had ‘been sensible enough to realize that I was not a good role model’ when he was about to come of age. Fredrik Schelderup’s relationship with his twenty-year-younger half-sister had always been distant. However, he did say that for someone her age, she appeared to be a remarkably determined and enterprising young lady.
A hint of seriousness returned once again to Fredrik Schelderup’s otherwise jocular expression when he said this. And when he had left the room, I sat and ruminated on whether I had also seen a hint of respect or fear when I looked in his eye.
Leonard Schelderup was an intense, gum-chewing man of twenty-seven, about half a head shorter than me. He appeared to glide into the room, with the classic light step and lithe body of a long-distance runner. He had managed to regain some composure by the time he came in for questioning, two hours after the murder, but was clearly still deeply affected by the drama in the dining room. He admitted as much himself and started by apologizing for his confused behaviour. He then added that the day’s events really were quite extraordinary, and that he felt particularly exposed.
