The Redbreast(146)

Eve when Daniel Gudeson was apparently shot

dead: Gudbrand Johansen. You have to find

Gudbrand Johansen, Inspector Hole.’

Then there was the sound of the receiver being

replaced, a bleep, and where Harry expected the

click, a new message instead.

‘Halvorsen here. It’s 11.30. I’ve just received a

call from one of the officers outside Mosken’s flat.

They’ve been waiting and waiting, but he hasn’t

returned home. So they tried to ring the number in

Drammen, just to see if he would answer the

phone. But he didn’t answer. One of the men drove

to Bjerken, but everything was locked up and the

lights were off. I asked them to stick it out for a

while yet and put out a call for Mosken’s car on

police radio. Just so you know. See you

tomorrow.’

New bleep. New message. New record on

Harry’s answerphone.

‘Halvorsen again. I’m going senile. I completely

forgot to mention the other thing. Looks as if we’ve

finally had a bit of luck. The SS archive in

Cologne didn’t have any personal details about

Gudeson or Johansen. They told me to ring the

central Wehrmacht archive in Berlin. There I

talked to a nice old grump who said that very few

Norwegians had been in the regular German army.

But when I explained the matter to him, he said he

would check anyway. After a while he rang back

and said that, as expected, he hadn’t found anything

about Daniel Gudeson. However, he had found

copies of some papers concerning one Gudbrand

Johansen, also a Norwegian. It appeared from the

papers that he had been transferred from the

Waffen SS to the Wehrmacht in 1944. A note was

made on the copies that the original papers were

sent to Oslo in the summer of 1944, which,

according to our man in Berlin, could only mean

that Johansen had been sent there. He also found

some correspondence with a doctor who had

signed Johansen’s medical certificates. In Vienna.’

Harry sat down on the only chair in the room.

‘The doctor’s name was Christopher Brockhard,

at the Rudolf II Hospital. I checked with the

Viennese police and it turns out the hospital is still

fully functional. They even gave me the name and

telephone number of twenty-odd people who

worked there during the war and are still alive.’

The Teutons know how to archive, Harry thought.

‘So I began ringing round. I’m really crap at

speaking German!’

Halvorsen’s laughter crackled in the loudspeaker.

‘I rang eight of them before I found a nurse who

could remember Gudbrand Johansen. She was an

old lady of seventy-five. Remembered him very

well, she said. You’ll have the number and her

address tomorrow morning. By the way, her name

is Mayer. Helena Mayer.’

A crackly silence was followed by a bleep and

the click of the tape recorder stopping.

Harry dreamed about Rakel, about her face

burrowing into his neck, about her strong hands,

and Tetris blocks falling and falling. But it was

Sindre Fauke’s voice that woke him in the middle

of the night and made him stare at the contours of a

figure in the dark.

‘You have to find Gudbrand Johansen.’

84

Akershus Fortress. 12 May 2000.

IT WAS 2.30 IN THE MORNING AND THE OLD MAN HAD

PARKED his car beside a low warehouse in a street

called Akershusstranda. Years ago the street had

been a main thoroughfare in Oslo, but after the

Fjellinje tunnel had been opened Akershusstranda

had been closed off at one end and was only used

during the day by those working in the docks. And

prostitutes’ clients who wanted a relatively

undisturbed place for the ‘walk’. Between the road

and the water there were several warehouses and

on the other side was the western side of Akershus

Fortress. Naturally, if anyone had taken up a

position in Aker Brygge with a quality riflescope

they would certainly have been able to see the

same as the old man did: the back of a grey coat

which jerked every time the man inside it thrust his

hips forward, and the face of a very made-up and

very drunken woman who was being banged

against the west wall of the fortress, right under the

cannons. On each side of the mating couple was a

floodlight projector lighting up the rock face and

the wall above them.

Akershus, the WWII Wehrmacht prison. The

internal section of the fortress area was closed for

the night, and even though he could probably find

his way in, the risk of being discovered in the

actual place of execution was too great. No one

really knew how many were shot there during the

war, but there was a memorial plaque for fallen

Norwegian Resistance men. The old man knew that

at least one of them was a common criminal who