Death In Oslo

XXVIII

‘Here? This door here?

DI Silje Sørensen stared at the terrified thirty-year-old and tried to hide her irritation. ‘Are you certain that it was this door?’

He nodded frantically.

She could, of course, understand the man’s fear. He was originally from Pakistan, but was a Norwegian citizen now. All his papers were in order, as far as he was concerned. But that was not the case for the young Pakistani woman whom he had recently married. She had been deported from Norway as a teenager for having stayed illegally in the country. A year later she was arrested at Gardermoen, carrying false papers and a neat little consignment of heroin in her luggage. She had pleaded that she had been forced to do it by the dealers, who would now kill her, and unbelievably she got away with simply being deported again, this time for ever. However, it didn’t stop her father from getting her married to a second cousin with a Norwegian passport. She had been smuggled back into Norway via Svinesund early one morning a few weeks ago, in a trailer from Spain, hidden behind four pallets of tomato juice.

Ali Khurram must really love her, Silje Sørensen thought to herself as she examined the door that he had pointed out to her. On the other hand, his extreme fear regarding his wife’s fate might also be connected to what his father-law-might do. Even though he lived in Karachi, nearly six thousand kilometres from Oslo, he had already managed to push two lawyers on DI Sørensen. Surprisingly, they had both been very understanding. They could see why a man who had smuggled the American president out of a hotel room in a dirty laundry basket might be asked for an explanation. They had nodded gravely when they were given some insight into the investigation, having been strictly reminded of their duty of confidentiality. One of the lawyers, who himself was of Pakistani origin, had then had a brief and whispered conversation with Ali Khurram in Urdu. The chat was so effective that Khurram had dried his tears and said he was happy to show them where in the cellar he had left the cleaning trolley.

Silje Sørensen looked at the architect’s drawings again. The enormous sheets were difficult to handle. The constable she had with her tried to hold one end, but the stiff paper buckled rebelliously in between them.

‘It’s not shown here,’ the constable said, trying to fold away any parts of the drawings that were not relevant.

‘We are in the right corridor, aren’t we?’

Silje looked around. The neon light on the ceiling was bright and unpleasant. The long corridor ended at a door in the west wall, behind which were some stairs that led up to ground level, two storeys above.

‘There are two basement levels,’ said a middle-aged man, who was nervously biting his puny moustache. ‘This is the lower level. So… yes, we are in the right corridor.’

He was the technical operations manager for the hotel and looked like he was about to crap himself. His legs were trembling nonstop and he couldn’t leave his moustache alone.

‘But it’s not shown on the drawings,’ Silje said, looking at the door with suspicion, as if it had been installed there in contravention of all laws and regulations.

‘Which drawings do you actually have?’ the operations manager asked, and tried to find a date.

‘What do you mean?’ the policeman said, making another attempt to fold the big sheets.

‘He said he was from the Secret Service when he rang my mobile number,’ whimpered Ali Khurram. ‘I couldn’t know that… He showed me his ID and everything! Like the ones you see on TV, with a photo, and stars and… He told me earlier on in the day that I had to come up as soon as he called. Immediately, he said! He was from the Secret Service and all that! I wasn’t to know that-’

‘You should have let us know when you realised what had happened,’ Silje said frostily and turned away from him. ‘You should have raised the alarm immediately. Have you figured it out?’ she asked the operations manager.

‘Yes, but my wife…’ Ali Khurram continued. ‘I was terrified because of… What’s going to happen to my wife? Is she going to have to leave now? Can’t she…’

‘Let’s not go over this again now,’ Silje said and raised a hand. ‘You’ve been explaining yourself for several hours now. The situation won’t change, either for you or your wife, just because you keep going on about it. Stand over there. And keep quiet.’

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 incredible 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!’