Lethal Investments

27

Gunnarstranda established that Sigurd Klavestad’s flat told him no more than he already knew. Two rooms, a kitchen and a combined toilet and shower with a door to the hall. Loads of mirrors in the hall. Funny ones. One made your nose look like a swede and another distorted your face into a figure eight, making it look like something from a cartoon.

Chaos. Comics, shoes and a variety of clothes, jackets and jumpers lay scattered across the floor. The man was not acquainted with the shelving principle, it struck Gunnarstranda. Or at least tidying up. He left the hall of mirrors to his intelligent colleague and studied the two posters on the wall. One a copy of a French poster from the nineteenth century. A can-can dancer with flapping clothes, a painting. The other was a bird’s-eye view of a short-sighted Marilyn Monroe. She lay reclined over a curtain, gloss lips slightly apart.

He continued into the bathroom and pulled up inside the door. The white washstand was spattered with blood on the inside. The floor was wet. Without a word, he stepped back into the sitting room.

Put on two thin plastic gloves from the roll he had in his pocket. Opened a window and called down to Klampenhaug.

There was something that bothered him about Klavestad’s death. He ransacked his brain. Realized it wasn’t Klavestad’s passage to the beyond that annoyed him but the new perspective. Something was niggling him at the back of his mind. A nagging doubt. The fear of having to change hypothesis.

Two cue words for the moment. Knife and night. He liked that. But he didn’t like the cut. The slash to the victim’s neck. He didn’t like that at all. What a damned nuisance that the man had been killed!

The murder would bring the stuffed shirts out of the woodwork, the schooled suits and ties who still felt a need to say aloud what everyone else was thinking. Hassle was brewing. Demands for statements and perhaps the odd press conference. Formalities. They irked him. But there was one positive side. He could feel himself getting angry. A good omen, he confirmed to himself and turned. Stood inspecting the stove. A slightly dusty tiled corner stove with a marble top and a nickel-plate handle. The old type.

Imbued with a sudden inspiration, he crouched down in front of it. Ran his hand warily along the iron. Stroked it again without the plastic glove this time. Hm. Possible.

Cautiously, so cautiously, he coaxed open the stove door. ‘Frølich,’ he called quietly.

Frølich came in from the hall. ‘I suppose he was in bed sleeping,’ he said. ‘The reading lamp was on and the bed unmade.’

‘Look here,’ Gunnarstranda whispered.

Frølich stooped down and peered into the smoking ashes. ‘He must have been heating the room,’ he commented lightly.

‘Not him,’ Gunnarstranda said thoughtfully. ‘Not him. And this is not wood. It’s smouldering. This is material. Clothing! If there’s anything left.’