Synnøve Jensen was just as ordinary and friendly as she had been before. Having first looked out of the window to check that it was me, she then opened the door immediately and gave me a brave smile. She had put some coffee and cakes out on the small living-room table. The ground floor consisted of a small kitchen and almost equally small living room. A stepladder-like stair with ten treads led up to the first floor, where I could see three doors, all closed.
My hostess waved her hand around, as if to apologize.
‘My home is not much to boast about. But it is all I have to offer my child, and all that my poor father had to offer me. He was a skilled carpenter once, or so said all those who had known him a long time. But then the bottle took him. Apparently he got the material for his own house from a building that had burnt down.’
I nodded with understanding. It was hard not to feel sympathy for this crooked little house and its pregnant owner. But all my attention was now focused on the metal box that was standing with its locked secrets on the kitchen table.
‘I swear that I have not even touched it since you rang. But I did open it last week, so my fingerprints will be on it, all the same,’ she added, hastily.
I lifted the metal box onto the living-room table and asked her not to look while I opened it. Synnøve Jensen nodded gravely and handed me the key straight away. Her hand was trembling when I touched it. She demonstratively turned her head away, eyes fixed on the floor, while I unlocked the box.
I don’t know whether I actually expected to find a letter in the box or not, even less what kind of letter I then expected to find. But I certainly had not anticipated finding what I did.
There was a stack of letters that nearly filled the box.
There were ten letters there. All had been sealed and addressed by hand. The letter on top, which I saw as soon as I opened the box, was, to my surprise, addressed to ‘Miss Synnøve Jensen’. The second was addressed to ‘Fredrik Schelderup Esq.’, the third to ‘Leonard Schelderup Esq.’ and the fourth to ‘Miss Maria Irene Schelderup’. Then all the others followed in succession. The letters in the box were addressed to the ten guests present at Magdalon Schelderup’s last lunch.
The temptation to open one of the letters immediately was irresistible. They all looked the same, so I started with the one on top. It contained photostat copies of two documents. One was the will that had been read to me by the lawyer, Edvard Rønning. The other was a very short letter, which said the following:
