Free The Last Pilgrim by Gard Sveen Page B

took out a report form from one of the three file boxes on his desk. Normally he did not fill out the forms himself, but God help him if he had the stomach to order someone else to do it in this case. If he was going to deny the obvious truth, he had to do the job himself.
    The inspector entered yesterday’s date in the top right corner. “May 30, 1945. Captain Kaj Holt found dead at Rindögatan 42. Examination of the scene points to suicide as the probable cause of death. Witness statements confirm this.” Persson opened the case file and studied the note with the words “Sorry. Kaj.” Then he wrote a couple of sentences about the testimonies of the apparently irresponsible girlfriend and Karen Eline Fredriksen from the Norwegian legation. He scribbled his signature at the bottom and slapped the folder shut.
    His hand no longer trembled as he replaced the cap on the fountain pen. Persson closed his eyes and saw himself standing in the kitchen at Rindögatan 42 and staring at the sad little birch tree in the backyard. Don’t tell me adieu, he thought.
    He opened the case file one last time and gazed impassively at what he’d just written. He wondered fleetingly how he, of all people, had ended up in such a situation. The terse report was patently false, yet he felt only a twinge of guilt, as if his own career were worth more than seeking justice for a dead man who had apparently been murdered.
    Quickly, before there was time to change his mind, he grabbed the file folder, strode across the old, tilting floor, and placed it in the anteroom. The secretary glanced at him over her typewriter. Persson raised an eyebrow at her and gave her a wan smile. Then he hurried down the corridor, past the investigators’ offices, and into the men’s room.
    He’d long ago lost count of how many times he’d washed his hands in near boiling-hot water. Persson stared at himself in the mirror. The day before, he’d looked fresh and rested, as if he’d spent the weekend out on his boat. But now?
    He whispered quietly to his own reflection, “Forgive me, for I know well what I have done.”

CHAPTER 12
    Monday, May 19, 2003
    Police Headquarters
    Oslo, Norway
     
    Tommy Bergmann pulled up the photo of the gold ring on the screen.
    Y OURS FOREVER . G USTAV .
     
    Then he clicked ahead to the photos of the two adult skulls, which were positioned on a metal table at the Institute of Forensic Medicine.
    So which of them had been Gustav’s forever? he wondered. Agnes Gerner or Johanne Caspersen?
    Judging by their ages, it was most likely that Johanne was Gustav’s chosen one. And Cecilia’s mother. But why hadn’t she taken his name? Could Gustav’s wife have survived, perhaps along with Gustav himself?
    Bergmann sighed with resignation. It was all a huge mess, a labyrinthine jumble. He was going to have to start from scratch.
    He phoned the archive, but hung up before anyone could answer. It was no use. If the case files still existed, they wouldn’t be here in this building, or even in the backup archive. He decided instead to try and find something in the National Registry. He typed in the names, one by one. No hits. He cross-checked “Gustav” with the surnames of the two women. Nothing. Not a single damned hit. People always boasted about how great the system was, but there were plenty of gaps in the records before 1947. Maybe it didn’t really matter—if you were dead, you could neither commit crimes nor pay taxes, so the tax authority and the justice system didn’t give a damn who you used to be, or when you were born. But it seemed that nobody had bothered to demand that these three be officially reported dead after the war, or they would have been on the missing-persons list. That could mean several things. The family might have wanted to believe they were still alive. But it was more likely that no one in their families, if any were still alive after the war, cared enough about them to bother reporting that they were