Murder on the Thirty-First Floor (13 page)

‘I’m not at liberty to discuss that,’ said Inspector Jensen.

Her face went through a whole series of fleeting expressions. Finally she threw out her hands in a gesture of helpless femininity, and said submissively:

‘Well I suppose I must resign myself.’

He was accompanied back down by the woman with dark hair. No sooner was the lift in motion than the girl gave a sob and said:

‘Don’t believe a word she says. She’s horrible, ghastly, a monster. There are the most disgusting stories going round about her.’

‘I see.’

‘She’s a monstrosity, so spiteful, so nosy. She’s still pulling all the strings, even since they managed to get her out of the building. Now she’s forcing me to be her spy. Every Wednesday and Saturday I have to come here and give her a complete report. She wants to know it all.’

‘Why are you doing it?’

‘Why? Good God, she could wipe me out in under ten
minutes, the way you squash a louse. She wouldn’t hesitate for an instant. And all the while she insults me. Oh God.’

Inspector Jensen said nothing. When they reached the ground floor, he doffed his hat and opened the doors. The young woman gave him a shy look and scuttled out into the street.

There was noticeably less traffic. It was Saturday. The time was five minutes to four. The right side of his diaphragm was hurting.

Inspector Jensen had switched off the engine, but was still sitting in the car, his notebook open on the steering wheel in front of him. He had just written: Number 4, art director, unmarried, age 20, employment terminated at own request.

Number 4 was also a woman.

The building was on the other side of the street. It was not brand new, but had been well maintained. He found the right door, conveniently located on the ground floor, and rang the bell. No one answered. He rang a couple more times, then knocked long and hard. Finally he tried the handle. The door was locked. Not a sound had come from inside. He stood there for a minute or two. While he was waiting, a telephone started to ring inside the flat. He returned to the car, left five pages of his pad blank and then wrote: Number 5, age 52, journalist, unmarried, left at the end of the agreed contract period.

This time he was lucky with the address: the street was in the same part of town and he only had to drive five blocks.

The building was just like the one he had been in ten minutes previously, long and yellow, five storeys high and set at an angle to the road. The whole district consisted of similar blocks of flats with laminated wood exteriors.

The sign on the door panel was made of letters cut from a newspaper or magazine and fixed on with sticky tape. Some of them had disintegrated or fallen off, making the name illegible.
The bell worked, but although he could hear someone moving about inside the flat, it was several minutes before the door was opened.

The man looked older than expected. What was more, he looked extremely unkempt, with matted hair in need of a cut, and a shaggy grey beard. He was wearing a grubby, off-white shirt, drooping trousers and worn black shoes. Inspector Jensen frowned. It was very unusual nowadays for people to be poorly dressed.

‘Inspector Jensen from the Sixteenth District. I’m conducting an investigation that has to do with your former employment and place of work.’

He did not bother to get out his ID.

‘Can you show me your ID?’ the man said at once.

Jensen showed him the enamel tag.

‘Come in,’ said the man.

He seemed self-confident, almost arrogant.

The mess in the flat was remarkable. The floors were covered in loose sheets of paper, newspapers, books, old oranges, bulging rubbish sacks, dirty clothes and unwashed cups, plates and dishes. The furniture comprised a couple of upright wooden chairs, two sagging armchairs, a rickety table and a sofa with an untidy jumble of bedclothes on it. One half of the table had been cleared, obviously to make space for a typewriter and a pile of typescript. There was a layer of thick, greyish dust over everything. The atmosphere was stuffy. And it smelt of alcohol. The man cleared the other half of the table with the aid of a folded newspaper. The indeterminable pile of paper, household articles and other junk fell to the floor.

‘Sit here,’ he said, pushing forward a chair.

‘You are inebriated,’ said Inspector Jensen.

‘Not drunk. Under the influence of alcohol. I never get drunk, but I’m under the influence most of the time. There’s quite a difference.’

Inspector Jensen sat down. The bearded man stood diagonally behind him.

‘You’re a good observer, or you wouldn’t have noticed,’ he said. ‘Most people don’t.’

‘When did you leave your employment?’

‘Two months ago. Why do you ask?’

Jensen put his spiral-bound pad on the table and leafed through it. As he reached the page with Number 3, the man came up behind his back.

‘I’m in select company, I see.’

Jensen continued turning the pages.

‘It amazes me you got away from that cow with your reason intact,’ said the man, walking round the table. ‘Did you go to her place? I’d never dare.’

‘You know her?’

‘Are you joking? I was working on that magazine when she arrived. When she was made chief editor. And I survived for nearly a whole year.’

‘Survived?’

‘I was younger and stronger then, of course.’

He sat down on the sofa bed, thrust his right arm into the tangle of dirty bed linen and pulled out the bottle.

‘Since you’ve noticed anyway, it doesn’t make any difference. And anyway, as I told you, I’m not drunk. Just a bit more on the ball.’

Jensen had his eyes fixed on him.

The man took a few swigs from the bottle, set it down and said:

‘What are you after?’

‘Some information.’

‘What about?’

Jensen didn’t answer.

‘If it’s that bitch you want to know about, you’ve come to the right address. Not many people know her better than me. I could write her biography.’

The man stopped, but did not seem to be expecting an answer. He peered at his visitor through screwed-up eyes, then at the window, which was almost opaque with filth. Despite the alcohol, his look was observant and alert.

‘Do you know how it happened, when she was put in charge of the biggest magazine in the country?’

Jensen said nothing.

‘Shame,’ said the man. ‘Nothing like enough people do. And yet it’s one of the major turning points in the history of the press.’

The room went quiet for a moment. Jensen regarded the man indifferently and twirled his plastic biro between his fingers.

‘Do you know what her job was before she became chief editor?’

He gave a spiteful laugh.

‘Cleaning lady. And do you know where she cleaned?’

Jensen drew a very small, five-pointed star on the empty page of his notepad.

‘In the holiest of holies. The management suite. How she’d managed to get put there, of all places, I don’t know, but I’m sure it was no coincidence.’

He leaned down and picked up the bottle.

‘She could arrange most things. You know, she was attractive,
damn attractive so everyone thought until they’d known her for five minutes.’

He drank.

‘In those days, the cleaning was always done after office hours. The cleaners came at six. All of them except her. She got there an hour early, when the chairman was generally still in his office. He liked to send the secretaries home on the dot of five and then spend some time on something he didn’t want anyone else to see. I don’t know what.

‘But I’ve got a pretty good idea,’ he said, looking towards the window.

The room had darkened. Jensen looked at his watch. It was a quarter past six.

‘At exactly a quarter past five she’d open the door to the chairman’s office, look in and say sorry, then shut it again. Whenever he was on his way out, or going to the toilet or something, he’d always see her disappear round a corner of the corridor.’

Inspector Jensen opened his mouth to say something, but instantly thought the better of it.

‘She was particularly attractive from behind, you see. I remember vividly what she used to look like. She had a pale blue cleaning overall and white clogs and a white headscarf, and she was always bare-legged. Presumably she’d heard the talk. I remember it was said that the chairman couldn’t resist the sight of the back of a pair of knees.’

The man got up, took a couple of sticky steps and switched on the light.

‘That hadn’t been going on very long before the chairman started making passes at her; he was known to be quite vigorous in that department. They say he always introduces himself first, absurdly enough. But do you know what happened?’

The light bulb hanging from the ceiling was coated in a greasy layer of dust and shed a faint, roving light.

‘She never answered when he spoke to her, just mumbled something shy and incomprehensible and gave him that doe-eyed look. She carried on exactly as before.’

Jensen drew another star. With six points.

‘He became obsessed with her. He did everything he possibly could. Tried to find out her address. He couldn’t. God knows where she hid away. They say he sent people to shadow her, but she outwitted them. Then she started coming a quarter of an hour later. He was still there. She came later and later, and he would generally be sitting in his room, pretending to be busy with something. So finally …’

He paused. Jensen waited thirty seconds. Then he raised his eyes and looked expressionlessly at the man on the sofa bed.

‘He was going out of his mind, see. One evening it was half past eight before she came, and by then all the other cleaners had finished and gone home. The light in his room was off, but she knew he was there because she’d seen his outdoor things. So she clumped up and down the corridor in her clogs a few times, and then she picked up her bloody bucket and went in and closed the door behind her.’

He laughed to himself, a low chuckle.

‘It’s too bloody good to be true,’ he said. ‘The chairman was standing behind the door in his string vest, and he threw himself at her with a bellow and tore off her clothes and sent her bucket flying and threw her to the ground and screwed her. She struggled and yelled and …’

The man broke off and regarded his visitor triumphantly.

‘And what do you think happened?’

Jensen was looking at something on the floor. It was impossible to tell whether he was listening.

‘Well just then, in comes a uniformed night-time security guard with a bunch of keys on his belt and shines his torch. When he sees who it is, he’s scared to death and slams the door and runs off, and the chairman runs after him. The guard dives into a lift and the chairman just manages to get in there with him as the doors close. He thinks the guard’s going to sound the alarm but the poor wretch is terrified and thinks he’s going to lose his job. She’d planned it all in advance, of course, and knew to the second when he came on his rounds and clocked in on that floor.’

The man gave a gurgle of suppressed laughter and squirmed among the tangled bedclothes.

‘Just imagine the chairman standing in the lift in nothing but a string vest with a petrified security guard in a uniform and peaked cap, with a torch and a truncheon and a big bunch of keys on his belt. They go all the way down to the paper store before either of them has the presence of mind to press the stop button and get the lift to go back up again. And when they get back, the guard isn’t a guard any more but the security manager of the whole site, even though he didn’t dare utter a word the whole way.’

The storyteller fell silent. The sparkle in his eyes seemed to fade. He said resignedly:

‘The old security manager got the sack for hiring deficient staff.’

‘Well, then came the negotiations of terms and conditions, and she must have played her cards brilliantly, because a week later an internal memo comes round, saying our chief editor’s been replaced, and a quarter of an hour later she sweeps into the editorial office and all hell breaks loose.’

The man appeared to remember the bottle, and took a cautious little swig.

‘You see, the magazine was really pretty good, but it wasn’t selling well. Even though it was all about princesses and how to make ginger snaps, it went over the readers’ heads, was how they put it, and there had been talk of closing it down. But …’

He gave his visitor a searching look, as if trying to make contact, but Jensen did not meet his eye.

‘It was pure
Kristallnacht
, what she did then. Practically the entire staff was weeded out and replaced by a pack of complete idiots. We had a sub-editor who was really a hairdresser and had never seen a semicolon. When she happened to see one on her typewriter, she came into my office and asked me what it was and I was so scared of getting the sack I didn’t dare tell her. I recall I told her it was just another example of intellectual snobbery.’

He ground his toothless jaws for a while.

‘The old cow hated anything intellectual, see, and according to her, almost everything was intellectual, and especially being able to write coherent sentences on a piece of paper. The only reason I survived was that I didn’t seem like the others. Plus the fact that I minded every single word I said. There was a newly hired reporter who was stupid enough to pass on some story about one of the other bosses, to ingratiate himself. It was something that had really happened, mind you, and it was a bloody funny story. A man from the ideas department had come up to the editorial office of the arts pages of one of the biggest papers and said August Strindberg was a hell of a good writer and his film
Miss Julie
would make a great picture serial if they rewrote it a bit and got rid of all the class barriers and other incomprehensible stuff. The arts editor thought for a
minute and then he said, ‘What did you say the writer was called?’ And the ideas guy said: ‘August Strindberg, you know.’ And then the arts editor said, ‘Oh yeah, him. Well, tell him to come to the Grand tomorrow at twelve and we’ll have lunch and talk about the price.’ So that reporter passed the story on, and she just gave him an icy cool look and said, ‘What’s so funny about that, then?’ And two hours later he had to clear his desk and go.’