Free The Catalyst Killing (K2 and Patricia series Book 3) by Hans Olav Lahlum Page B

radical circles she frequented, some of whose members were not averse to the idea of terrorism and illegal activity. But he did not know any of the others involved, and so could not point anyone out as a suspect.
    As I was leaving, he suddenly remarked that it would no doubt be some time before his daughter could be buried due to the ongoing investigation, but that when the time came he supposed it would be he who had to do it. I confirmed this assumption: Marie Morgenstierne had at the time of her death been unmarried, and her father was her closest relative. He said he would have to consider the situation, but thought that perhaps she should be buried beside her mother in the family grave.
    I pointed out that that had nothing to do with me or the police, but that personally I thought it was a good idea. And in some way in that moment, it felt as though Marie Morgenstierne was one step closer to reconciliation with her parents, albeit after her own and her mother’s death. Her father and I shook hands and parted on almost friendly terms.
    When I left the house in Frogner at ten past seven, I had still only seen Martin Morgenstierne’s smile on old photographs. But little else was to be expected, given what I now knew about the family history. And given the father’s alibis it seemed very unlikely that he had anything to do with his daughter’s death, or with her fiancé’s disappearance.
    XVI
    I had plenty of new information to worry about on my short drive to the grand Borchmann residence at 104 –8 Erling Skjalgsson’s Street. The case was becoming increasingly complex, and a solution was no closer than it had been this morning. However, as I parked the car, it was the thought of how it would be to see Patricia again that bothered me most. My last visit there had been some fifteen months earlier, on the Norwegian national day, and that 17 May had ended dramatically when I more or less fled the house just before midnight.
    To my relief, the impressive white building was just as I remembered. To step through the door was still like taking a step back in time to the 1930s. It was Patricia’s father, the professor and company director Ragnar Sverre Borchmann, who had contacted me in connection with my first murder investigation two years ago. This time, he was nowhere to be seen. But I was still graciously received. I was, just as before, unable to tell whether the maid was Beate or Benedikte, as they were identical twins. But I assumed that Benedikte would not be back at work yet as she had had a baby the year before, so I guessed it was Beate, and did not ask. She was standing at the ready as soon as I rang the doorbell, and whispered: ‘Don’t say that I told you, but she’s been looking forward to this and waiting impatiently for you all day.’
    I gave her a friendly smile and took this as a sign that our complicity from the two previous investigations had been re-established.
    The library – where the now twenty-year-old Patricia Louise I. E. Borchmann had spent most of her waking hours since a car accident had killed her mother and left her paralysed from the waist down – was still the same, too. And there she was, surrounded by all her books, sitting back in her wheelchair, apparently relaxed, with a thick notebook and three ballpoint pens at the ready on the large table.
    The new decade had heralded few changes in here. The twenty-year-old Patricia I met in summer 1970 looked more or less the same as the nineteen-year-old Patricia I had fled from in spring 1969. I was convinced that she remembered my hasty retreat, but she did nothing to show it if that was the case. The starter to a delicious three-course meal was already on the table.
    It did not feel natural for me to shake her hand, or to initiate any form of physical contact, and fortunately she did not appear to feel inclined either. But it did feel absolutely natural that I should come back here to seek her advice, now that I was once again in the