The Redbreast(75)

‘NICE THAT WE COULD MEET LIKE THIS,’ BERNT

BRANDHAUG said, raising his wineglass.

They toasted and Aud Hilde smiled at the Under

Secretary for Foreign Affairs.

‘And not only on official business,’ he said,

holding her gaze until she looked down. Brandhaug

studied her. She wasn’t exactly attractive, her

features were a little too coarse for that and she

was certainly plump, but she had a charming, flirty

way about her and she was young plump.

She had rung him from the staff office this

morning saying they needed his advice on an

unusual case, but before she could say any more he

had asked her up to his office. And when she was

there he had immediately decided he didn’t have

the time and they could discuss it over a meal after

work.

‘We civil servants should also have a few perks,’

he had said. She presumed he meant the meal.

So far everything had gone well. The head waiter

had given them Brandhaug’s regular table and, to

the best of his knowledge, there was no one he

knew in the room.

‘Yes, there’s this strange case we had yesterday,’

she said, letting the waiter unfold the napkin over

her lap. ‘We had a visit from an elderly man who

maintained that we owed him money. The Foreign

Office, that is. Almost two million kroner, he said,

referring to a letter he had sent in 1970.’

She rolled her eyes. She shouldn’t wear so much

make-up, Brandhaug thought.

‘So what did we owe him money for?’

‘He said he was a merchant seaman during the

war. It was something to do with Nortraship. They

had withheld his pay.’

‘Oh, yes, I think I know what it was about. What

else did he say?’

‘That he couldn’t wait any longer. That we had

cheated him and all the other merchant seamen.

God would punish us for our sins. I don’t know if

he had been drinking or he was ill, but he looked

under the weather. He brought a letter with him,

signed by the Norwegian Consul General in

Bombay in 1944, who guaranteed, on behalf of the

Norwegian state, the back payment of the war-risk

bonus for four years’ service as an officer in the

Norwegian merchant navy. Had it not been for the

letter, we would have just given him the heave-ho

of course, and we wouldn’t have bothered you

with this trivial matter.’

‘You can come to me any time you wish, Aud

Hilde,’ he said, with a sudden stab of panic: her

name was Aud Hilde, wasn’t it?

‘Poor man,’ Brandhaug said, gesturing to the

waiter to bring more wine. ‘The sad thing about

this case is that he is actually right. Nortraship was

established to administer the boats in the merchant

fleet that the Germans had not already captured. It

was an organisation with partly political and partly

commercial interests. The British, for example,

paid large sums in risk bonuses to Nortraship to

use Norwegian shipping. But the money, instead of

being used to pay the crews, went straight into the

ship-owners’ pockets and the state’s coffers.

We’re talking about several hundred million

kroner here. The merchant seamen tried to get their

money back through legal proceedings, but they

lost their case in the Supreme Court in 1954. The

Storting passed an act in 1972, establishing that

merchant seamen had a right to this money.’

‘This man doesn’t seem to have received

anything. Because he was in the China Sea and was

torpedoed by the Japanese and not by the Germans,

he said.’

‘Did he say what his name was?’

‘Konrad Åsnes. Wait a moment and I’ll show you

the letter. He had worked out how much was owed

with compound interest.’

She bent to look in her bag. Her upper arms

quivered. She should do a bit more exercise,

Brandhaug thought. Four kilos less and Aud Hilde

would simply be well-rounded instead of . . . fat.

‘It’s alright,’ he said. ‘I don’t need to see it.

Nortraship comes under the Ministry of

Commerce.’

She looked up at him.

‘He insisted we were the ones who owed him the

money. He gave us a deadline of two weeks.’

Brandhaug laughed.

‘Did he? And what’s the rush now, after sixty

years?’

‘He didn’t say. He only said that we would have

to take the consequences if we didn’t pay.’

‘My goodness.’ Brandhaug waited until the

waiter had poured out more wine for them before

leaning forward. ‘I hate taking the consequences,

don’t you?’ She flashed him a hesitant smile.

Brandhaug raised his glass.

‘I was wondering what we should do about this

case?’ she said.