I was certain that the young Swedish woman probably smiled more on a warm sunny day and that her gaze was steadier than it was now. I found it easy to accept that a murder in the same building would be very frightening indeed for a foreign female student.
Flat 2A had some rather cluttered bookshelves, crammed with Norwegian, Swedish and English books, but was otherwise the flat of a tidy young woman. And apart from some kitchen knives, there was no evidence of any weapons in her flat either. She was momentarily baffled when I asked her if she had seen anyone in a blue raincoat, but then replied that she had not seen anyone in such a garment in the building, not yesterday or before.
Sara Sundqvist said that she had only spoken to the now deceased Harald Olesen briefly on a couple of occasions. He seemed to be a very friendly, if quiet and correct old gentleman. She had made efforts to be on first-name terms with the caretaker’s wife and the other people in the building, and had nothing negative to say about any of them. However, she could not claim to know any of them very well. ‘The Lunds, of course, only have eyes for each other and their little boy, and the others are all men who are a good deal older than me.’
There was nothing dramatic about Flat 2A and its tenant, and both struck me as being trustworthy. It was with some hesitation that I refrained from striking Sara Sundqvist from the list of suspects.
According to the red heart-shaped nameplate, Kristian and Karen Lund lived in Flat 2B. With their thirteen-month-old son peacefully asleep in his cot, they came across as the epitome of a young, happy couple. And though they smiled every time they looked at each other or their son, the sombreness soon returned when they met my eye. Kristian Lund was a blond, stocky man of around five foot eleven who no doubt was normally relaxed and charming. However, he was now visibly shaken by the situation. He repeated several times that a murder in the building was of particular concern to someone with a wife and child, and that he was not at all sure whether he dared to leave them alone while he was at work until the murderer had been caught.
Neither Mr nor Mrs Lund could for a moment imagine that anyone in the building was behind the crime, so the murderer must somehow have managed to get in from outside. They only had good things to say about Harald Olesen. At times he might appear to be a bit lonely – he was after all a pensioner living on his own – but he was still an elegant man of vigour. The Lunds had never seen any guns in the building, and certainly not in their flat. The key words ‘blue raincoat’ meant nothing to them.