Death in Oslo

by Anne Holt

  She pointed firmly at a point on the floor a few metres away from the door. Ali Khurram slunk down the corridor. He had his hands in front of his face and was mumbling in Urdu. The uniformed policeman followed him.

  ‘You’ve got the wrong drawings,’ the operations manager said finally. ‘These are the originals. From when the hotel was built, I mean. It was finished in 2001. This door wasn’t there then.’

  He smiled, which was presumably an attempt to charm her, as if the door was no longer anything to worry about, now that the mystery of the incorrect drawings had been cleared up.

  ‘The wrong drawings,’ Silje Sørensen repeated, in a flat voice.

  ‘Yes,’ the operations manager said keenly. ‘Or, well . . . actually, this door isn’t shown on any of the drawings. We were ordered to make a door from here into the car park, in connection with the building of the opera, you know, with explosions and the like, just in case anything should happen . . .’

  ‘Which car park?’ Silje Sørensen asked, exasperated.

  ‘That one,’ the operations manager said and pointed at the wall.

  ‘That one? That one?’

  Silje Sørensen was a rarity: a very rich policewoman. She did what she could to hide her greatest weakness, which was her arrogance, the result of a sheltered childhood and inherited wealth. But she was having great difficulty now.

  The operations manager was an idiot.

  His jacket was tasteless. Burgundy and badly fitted. His trousers were shiny on the knees. His moustache was ridiculous. His nose was narrow and crooked and reminded her of a beak. And he was crawling to her. Despite the seriousness of the situation, he was smiling all the time. Silje Sørensen felt an almost physical disgust for the man, and when he put his hand on her arm in a gesture of camaraderie, she shrugged it off.

  ‘That one,’ she repeated, trying to control her temper. ‘That’s a little imprecise, isn’t it? What do you mean?’

  ‘The car park for Central Station,’ he explained. ‘There’s no exit there from the hotel. You have to go round. So if the guests—’

  ‘You just said that this door goes through to there,’ she interrupted and swallowed.

  ‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘It does! But it’s not used. We were ordered to make it when they were building the opera, in connection with the excavations.’

  ‘You’ve already said that.’ She ran her hand over the rather coarsely fitted door frame. ‘Why is there no handle?’

  ‘As I said, the intention was never to use the door. We were just ordered to make an entrance into the car park. We’ve taken the handle off for security reasons. And as far as I know, it was never added to any drawings.’

  He scratched his neck and bent down. Silje could not understand how a door could be used as an emergency exit in the event of an explosion or similar if it couldn’t be opened. But she couldn’t face going into any more detail. Instead she held out her hand for the loose door handle that the operations manager had pulled from a voluminous bag with the hotel’s logo on the side of it.

  ‘The key,’ she demanded and put the handle in place.

  The operations manager obeyed. It only took a couple of seconds to unlock the door. She was careful not to leave any fingerprints. Forensics were already on their way to see if there was still any technical evidence there. She opened the door. The dark smell of parked cars and old exhaust hit them. Silje Sørensen just stood in the doorway and did not go into the car park.

  ‘The exit’s over there, isn’t it?’ She pointed right, towards the east.

  ‘Yes. And I might add . . .’ He was smiling even more now, and his nervousness seemed to ease as he continued: ‘It was the Secret Service themselves who inspected this area. Everything was in perfect order. They even got their own handle and key. For the door and for the lift. They did a very impressive job. They inspected the hotel from top to bottom, several days before the President arrived.’

  ‘Who did you say got the key and a handle?’ Silje asked him, without turning round.

  ‘The Secret Service.’

  ‘Who in the Secret Service?’

  ‘I . . . um . . . who . . .’ The operations manager laughed nervously. ‘The place was crawling with them. Obviously I didn’t get to know all their names.’

  Silje Sørensen finally turned around. She closed the heavy door, pulled the handle out again and put it in her bag, along with the key. From a side pocket she produced a sheet of paper, which she then held up for the operations manager to see.

  ‘Was it him?’

  The man squinted and pushed his face out to get a closer look at the paper, without moving his body. He looked like a vulture.

  ‘That’s the one! Names escape me, but I never forget a face. Hazard of the job, I guess. In the hotel business—’

  ‘Are you absolutely certain?’

  ‘Yes.’ The operations manager laughed again. ‘I remember him well. Really nice guy. He was down here a couple of times, in fact.’

  ‘On his own?’

  The man had to think about it. ‘Um . . . yes . . .’ He drew it out. ‘There were so many of them. But I’m almost certain that he covered this part of the basement himself. I was with him, of course. I personally—’

  ‘That’s fine,’ Silje said and put the photograph of Jeffrey Hunter back in her bag. ‘Did anyone come down here afterwards?’

  ‘What do you mean by afterwards? After the President had disappeared?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No,’ the operations manager said, and then added: ‘In the hours immediately after the alarm had been raised, the whole building was searched from top to bottom. Of course, I can’t be sure, as I was in the office with the police, checking everything with the drawings . . .’ he waved at the papers that were sticking up out of Silje’s bag, ‘and giving orders about this and that. In any case, the basement was cordoned off.’

  ‘Cordoned off? The basement?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’ He smiled meaningfully. ‘For security reasons . . .’

  The phrase sounded like a mantra, something he said hundreds of times a day and which had therefore lost all meaning. ‘The lower basement was closed off well before the President arrived. As I understood it, the Secret Service wanted to . . . minimise all risk. They closed off parts of the west wing too. And sections of the seventh and eighth floor. What they call minimal risk, or . . . minimising risk . . .’ He desperately tried to remember the new English phrase he had learnt. ‘Minimalise the risk area,’ he said happily in Norwegian in the end. ‘Quite normal. In those circles. Very sensible.’

  ‘So the police might actually never have come down here,’ Silje said slowly. ‘In the hours after the President had been kidnapped, I mean.’

  ‘No . . .’

  Again he seemed to be unsure about what she actually wanted to hear. He stared at her intently without finding the answer.

  ‘Well, the whole floor was closed off. Locked. You can only take the lift down here if you have a key. I’m sure you understand that we don’t want guests wandering around down here. Technical equipment and . . . Yes, you understand. Like I said, we had given keys to the Secret Service, but no one else had them. Apart from me, and those of my employees who—’

  ‘Were these drawings used when the building was searched?’ Silje Sørensen asked and grabbed the papers from her bag.

  ‘No. Those are the original drawings. We used the most recent ones, which include the presidential suite. But the drawings of the basement are just the same, so that the floor plan you have . . .’ he pointed at it, ‘is identical. The basement. In both versions.’

  ‘And none of the drawings include this door?’ Silje asked again, as if it was hard to believe.

  ‘We cooperated fully with the police,’ the operations manager assured her. ‘We worked closely and well with them, both before and after the kidnapping.’

  Oh my God, Silje thought to herself and swallowed. There were too many of us. Far too many cooks and an incredib
le mess. The basement was closed off and locked. According to the drawings, there’s no door here. They were looking for an escape route and everything was chaotic. We didn’t find the door because we weren’t looking for it.

  ‘Could I go home now?’ Ali Khurram asked, still standing close to the wall, several metres away. ‘Can I not go now?’

  ‘People like you never cease to amaze me,’ Silje Sørensen said savagely, without taking her eyes from the desperate man. ‘Don’t you understand anything? Do you really think that you can break the law as you please and then be allowed to go home to your wife as if nothing had happened? Do you really believe that?’

  She took a step towards him. Ali Khurram said nothing. Instead he looked up at the constable. The tall policeman was called Khalid Mushtak, and had graduated from police college a couple of years earlier with the best marks in his year. His eyes narrowed and his Adam’s apple gave away the fact that he had swallowed, but he said nothing.

  ‘When I said people like you,’ Silje corrected herself swiftly, puncturing the air with great big speech marks, ‘I didn’t mean people like you in that sense. I meant . . . I meant people who haven’t learnt to understand our system. Who don’t understand how . . .’

  She stopped abruptly. The constant buzz of the colossal unprotected ventilation system that ran along the ceiling was the only thing to be heard. The operations manager had finally stopped smiling. Ali Khurram wasn’t snivelling any more. Khalid Mushtak stared at the policewoman, but didn’t say a word.

  ‘I apologise,’ Silje Sørensen said eventually. ‘I’m sorry. That was a very stupid thing to say.’

  She held her hand out to the policeman.

  He didn’t accept.

  ‘It isn’t me you should be apologising to,’ he said in a neutral tone, and put handcuffs on the arrestee. ‘It’s this guy here. But you’ll have plenty of opportunity to do that. My guess is that he’ll be detained for some time.’

  The smile he gave her as he snapped the handcuffs shut was neither cold nor scornful; it was sympathetic.

  Silje Sørensen could not remember the last time she had felt like such a complete fool. But it was even worse that there was an emergency exit from the Hotel Opera that no one had known about, other than a Secret Service agent who had now taken his own life.

  Presumably out of shame, she thought as she felt herself blushing.

  Worst of all was the fact that it had taken a day and a half to find it.

  ‘A bloody door,’ muttered the woman who never swore.

  She went up the stairs behind Khalid Mushtak’s broad back.

  ‘It took us forty hours to find a damn door. God knows what else we haven’t found yet!’

  XXIX

  ‘A door. They found a door.’

  Warren Scifford passed his hand over his eyes. His hair looked wet, as if he’d just washed it. He had changed out of his suit into jeans and a wide dark blue sweatshirt, with YALE written in big letters across the chest. His boots looked like they were made from real snakeskin. The outfit made him look older than he did in a suit. The fact that his skin was starting to loosen on his neck was more obvious in a baggy sweatshirt. His suntanned complexion no longer gave a healthy, sporty impression. On the contrary, there was something forced about his appearance in such youthful clothes that somehow highlighted the fact that his skin was unnaturally tanned for the time of year. He had one leg crossed over the other and might have looked like he was about to fall asleep, had it not been for the toe of the upper boot that was tapping nervously. Again he was lying more than sitting in the chair, with his elbows resting on the arms. ‘A door that we can confirm was checked by the Secret Service,’ Adam Stubo said. ‘By Jeffrey Hunter. When did you discover that he’d disappeared?’

  Warren Scifford took his time straightening up. Only now did Adam notice that he had cut himself badly and the blood was seeping through a plaster just by his left ear. The smell of aftershave was a hint too strong.

  ‘He called in sick,’ the American said eventually.

  ‘When?’

  ‘On the morning of the sixteenth of May.’

  ‘So he was here before the President came to Norway?’

  ‘Yes. He was the person in charge of securing the hotel. He came here on the thirteenth.’

  The Chief of Police, Bastesen, stirred his coffee. He watched the whirlpool in his cup with fascination.

  ‘I thought those guys were completely incorruptible,’ he mumbled in Norwegian. ‘No wonder we haven’t got anywhere.’

  ‘Pardon me?’ Warren Scifford snapped, obviously irritated.

  ‘So he called in sick,’ Adam interjected quickly. ‘It must have been something pretty serious, eh? For the person in charge of security at the hotel to call in sick twelve hours before the President arrives – can’t happen very often. I would assume that—’

  ‘The Secret Service had enough people,’ Warren interrupted. ‘And anyway, everything was on schedule. The hotel had been examined, plans had been made, parts of the area were cordoned off, a system had been set up. The Secret Service is never sloppy. They’ve got back-up for pretty much everything, no matter how unlikely it may seem.’

  ‘Well, I’m afraid it has to be said that they’ve been sloppy here,’ Adam said. ‘When one of their own special agents is involved in the disappearance of the elected president of the United States.’

  The room was silent. The Director General of PST, Peter Salhus, unscrewed the lid of his Coke bottle. Terje Bastesen had finally put down his coffee cup.

  ‘We’re taking this very seriously indeed,’ he said after a while, and tried to catch the American’s eye. ‘You must have realised fairly early on that one of your own people was involved. The fact that you didn’t—’

  ‘No,’ Warren exclaimed sharply. ‘We were not . . .’

  He stopped. Again he passed his hand over his eyes. It almost seemed that he wanted to hide them on purpose.

  ‘The Secret Service was not aware that Jeffrey Hunter had disappeared until late in the day yesterday,’ he said, after a pause that was so prolonged a secretary had had time to come in with yet another lukewarm pizza and a case of mineral water. ‘They had other things to think about. And yes, his illness did seem to be serious. A slipped disc. The guy couldn’t move. They tried pumping him full of painkillers in the morning of the sixteenth of May, but all he managed to do was lie in bed, dozing.’

  ‘Or so he said.’

  Warren looked at Adam, and gave a hint of a nod. ‘Yes, that’s what he said.’

  ‘Was he examined by a doctor?’

  ‘No. Our people are medically trained. A slipped disc is a slipped disc, and there isn’t much to be done about it, except rest or have it operated on. And if that was going to happen, it would have to be after the President’s visit.’

  ‘An X-ray would have shown the truth.’

  Warren didn’t bother to answer. Instead he leant over towards the pizza, wrinkled his nose ever so slightly and did not help himself.

  ‘And as far as the FBI are concerned,’ he said, taking a bottle of water instead, ‘we were not aware of anything until you showed me that film this afternoon. We have, of course, made our own investigations since. Compared them with what the Secret Service has found out . . .’

  Warren got up and went over to the window. They were in the Chief of Police’s office on the sixth floor of the Police HQ, and had a fantastic view of the grey May night. The lights from the media village on the grass outside the window were stronger now, and continued to grow in number. It was only an hour or so now until the darkest time of night, but the grass was bathed in artificial light. The trees along the road to the prison were like a wall against the dark on the other side of the park.

  He drank some water, but said nothing.

  ‘Could it be something as simple as money?’ Peter Salhus asked quietly. ‘Money for his family?’

  ‘If only it was that simple,’ Warren said to his own reflection in the wi
ndow. ‘It was the children. And now there’s a desperate widow sitting somewhere in a residential area between Baltimore and Washington DC who realises that she and her husband have done something terrible. They’ve got three children. The youngest is autistic, but given the circumstances he’s doing OK. He goes to a special school. It’s expensive and Jeffrey Hunter presumably had to watch every penny to make it possible. But he had never accepted black money. There is nothing to indicate that. However, the boy has been kidnapped twice in the past two months. Each time he reappeared again before a full alarm was raised, but he was gone long enough for the parents to panic. The message was clear: do what you’re asked to do in Oslo, or the boy will disappear for good.’

  Peter Salhus was genuinely shocked when he asked: ‘But would an experienced Secret Service agent let himself be blackmailed in that way? Couldn’t he just make sure that his family was put under protection? A government agent, if anyone, must surely be able to withstand such a threat.’

  Warren was still standing with his back to them. His voice was flat, as if he nearly couldn’t bear to get involved in the story.

  ‘The boy was taken from his school the first time, which should, in practice, be impossible. Public and especially private schools, like this one, are hysterical when it comes to the safety of their pupils. But someone managed to do it. The boy was then sent into hiding with an old school friend of his mother’s in California. Here he was given home tutoring, and no one, not even his brother and sister, knew where he was. But he disappeared from there too, one afternoon. He was only gone for four hours, and neither the school friend nor anyone else could explain how it had happened. But the message was crystal clear.’

  With a short burst of dry laughter, Warren finally turned around and went back to his chair.

  ‘They would find the boy, no matter what. Jeffrey Hunter felt like he had no choice. But obviously the betrayal was too much to live with. The shame. He realised full well that sooner or later someone would discover that he was involved; that someone at some point would think about checking the CCTV footage from the time after the kidnapping.’