A bunch of keys that editor-in-chief Ida Caroline Ovesen has lent to Henning is jingling in his hands. One of the keys fits the lock of a basement storeroom where all superfluous office equipment was dumped during the refurbishment until someone found a suitable home for it. ‘It’ll probably stay there for ever,’ Ida remarked.
She had no idea where his cassette tapes might be. The refurbishment had been chaotic, and many staff had helped clear out the offices. This impression of chaos is reinforced when Henning enters a room filled to the rafters with chairs, desks, old computers, boxes of wires and cables, mice and mouse mats, ring binders and bookcases, workstations and monitors.
Henning moves a chair, clambers to the first desk and opens its drawers one by one, but they are all empty. The desks are identical, and none of them has his or any of his colleagues’ names on them so he has no other choice but to go through all of them and keep his fingers crossed that he might have some luck for once. He clears a path, taking one drawer at a time and slamming it shut as soon as he has looked inside. Soon he has built up a rhythm, but it produces no result.
Perhaps the drawers were emptied first, he speculates. He closes his eyes and imagines being the person who cleared out and removed the tapes from his desk. Could they have been put in a separate box? Bundled together with sticky tape even? Henning opens his eyes and locates the packing crates but soon realises that the filing system used was the one known as chucking stuff in any old box. Ten minutes later he has rummaged through all of them without finding a single audio cassette.
He looks around again. At the rear, behind the storage crates, he can see an unvarnished pine shelving unit filled with old stationery, headed paper with 123news ’s old logo, envelopes, pens — even umbrellas and white T-shirts. Henning works his way across to it, stepping over a dusty computer monitor in the process, and starts scanning the shelf in front of him at eye level. Nothing of interest. He stands on tiptoe and takes down a box from the top shelf. As he does so its bottom falls out and the contents cascade around his feet. He bends down and feels twinges in his back and hip, pain that sometimes returns as a reminder — as if he could ever forget the slippery railing and the fatal flagstones two floors below, but he grits his teeth and searches through the rubbish which someone decided was worth keeping. Conference papers for the Norwegian Foundation for Investigative Journalism. Union agreements. A computer mouse. Three pens that are unlikely to work. He removes two half-empty boxes of drawing pins that have fallen out — and spots a pile of cassettes held together with yellow tape. The initials HJ have been written on the side followed by a question mark.
Henning smiles. So someone did pack them, he thinks, delighted, as he counts eight cassettes, each containing four hours of recording time. He realises immediately that he will be unable to concentrate on anything else until he has listened to all of them. Perhaps he could ask Heidi Kjus for a few days’ leave.
His thoughts are interrupted by his mobile ringing. The caller is unknown, but Henning replies.
‘It’s Tore Pulli. Olsvik said you wanted me to call you.’
Henning stands up and feels his back ache. ‘Yes. Eh, great.’
He tries to organise his thoughts but ends up asking the first question that comes into his head. ‘How do we know each other?’
The seconds pass without Pulli replying.
‘The first time we spoke, you asked me if I remembered you. That’s not a question you ask someone you’ve never met or spoken to before. But I have no memory of us meeting. I remember nothing from the weeks or days before my son died. So, I was wondering, did we have any contact around the time of the fire at my flat? Did we know each other?’
The seconds tick away while Henning grows increasingly agitated.
‘I read somewhere that you weren’t in the habit of giving interviews, Pulli. Was I trying to arrange an interview with you? Was that the reason?’
Pulli doesn’t reply.
‘Was I working on a story where you were one of the players?’
Still silence.
‘Why were you outside my flat that night? And I mean, really?’
Pulli sighs. ‘I can’t tell you anything about that, Juul.’
‘Why not?’
‘I just can’t. The telephone in here is being monitored.’
‘I don’t give a damn about that.’
‘No, but I do.’
‘If you want my help, you have to not care about that.’
Pulli sighs. As does Henning when Pulli takes a long time to consider his response.
‘I can’t tell you on the telephone,’ he says eventually.
‘Then tell me this,’ Henning counters aggressively. ‘How did you know that I was back at work?’
Another silence.
‘Great,’ Henning snorts. ‘I can’t be bothered with this. Good luck with your appeal.’