“I understand. Sorry.”
“Where are you from, frøken Wiig?”
Tonje Wiig looked at him in surprise. Then she gave a strained chuckle. “Is this supposed to be an interrogation, Hole?”
Harry didn’t answer.
“If you absolutely have to know, I grew up in Fredrikstad.”
“That’s what I thought I could hear,” he said with a wink.
The spry woman in reception was leaning back in her chair and holding a bottle of perfume to her nose. When Harry discreetly cleared his throat she gave a start and laughed in embarrassment with her eyes full of water.
“Sorry, the air in Bangkok is very bad,” she explained.
“I’ve noticed. Could you give me the chauffeur’s telephone number?”
She shook her head and snorted. “He hasn’t got a telephone.”
“OK. Has he got a place to live?”
It was meant as a joke, but he could see from her face that she didn’t appreciate it. She wrote down the address and gave him a tiny parting smile.
9
Saturday, January 11
A servant was standing at the door as Harry walked up the drive to the ambassador’s residence. He led Harry through two large rooms, tastefully furnished in cane and teak, to the terrace door, which opened onto the garden behind the house. The orchids sparkled in yellow and blue, and butterflies fluttered past like colored paper under large willow trees offering shade. They found the ambassador’s wife, Hilde Molnes, by an hourglass-shaped swimming pool. She was sitting in a wicker chair wearing a pink robe, a matching drink on the table in front of her, and sunglasses which covered half her face.
“You must be Detective Hole,” she said in a Sunnmøre accent. “Tonje said you were on your way. A drink, Detective?”
“No, thank you.”
“Oh, you must. It’s important to drink in this heat, you know. Think of your liquid levels even if you aren’t thirsty. Here you can dehydrate before your body tells you.”
She removed her sunglasses, and Harry saw, as he had guessed from her raven-black hair and dark skin, that she had brown eyes. They were lively but red-rimmed. Grief or the preprandial drink, Harry thought. Or both.
He estimated her age at mid-forties, but she was well kept. A middle-aged, slightly faded beauty from the upper-middle classes. He had seen them before.
He sat down in the other wicker chair, which wrapped itself around his body as if it had known he was coming.
“In that case I’ll have a glass of water, fru Molnes.”
She informed the servant and sent him off.
“Have you been told that you can go and see your husband now?”
“Yes. Thank you,” she said. Harry noticed a curt undertone. “Now they let me see him. A man I’ve been married to for twenty years.”
The brown eyes had turned black, and Harry reflected that it was probably true that lots of shipwrecked Portuguese and Spanish sailors had drifted ashore on the Sunnmøre coast.
“I’m obliged to ask you some questions,” he said.
“Then you’d better do it now while the gin’s still working.”
She swung a slim, sun-tanned leg over her knee.
Harry took out a notepad. Not that he needed any notes, but it meant he wouldn’t have to look at her while she answered. As a rule it made talking to next of kin easier.
She told him that her husband had left home in the morning and had not mentioned anything about coming home late, but it was not unusual for something to crop up. When it was ten in the evening and she still hadn’t heard from him she had tried calling, but she didn’t get an answer from either the office or his mobile phone. Nevertheless, she hadn’t been worried. Just after midnight Tonje Wiig had called and said her husband had been found dead in a motel room.
Harry studied Hilde Molnes’s face. She spoke with a firm voice and without any dramatic gestures.
Tonje Wiig had given Hilde Molnes the impression they didn’t know what the cause of death was yet. The next day the embassy had informed her that he had been murdered, but as regards the cause of death instructions from Oslo imposed absolute silence on all of them. That included Hilde Molnes, even though she was not employed by the embassy, because all Norwegian citizens can be forced to maintain silence if state security considerations demand it. She said the latter with deep sarcasm and raised her glass to a skål.
Harry just nodded and took notes. He asked if she was sure he hadn’t left his mobile phone at home, to which she answered she was. On an impulse he asked what kind of mobile phone he had and she replied that she wasn’t sure, but thought it was Finnish.
She couldn’t help him with the name of anyone who might have had a motive for wishing the ambassador dead.