The very fact that the gun was missing of course disproved any theories of suicide. However, there was no evidence that another living person had been in the flat, or any indication of how the murderer might have left the scene of the crime. Harald Olesen lived in an ordinary two-bedroom flat with a bathroom and kitchen, but no balcony. The thirty-foot drop down to the pavement made the windows an unlikely escape route. Any ideas of fire ropes or mountaineering equipment being used to escape floundered on the fact that the windows were closed from the inside.
In other words, the front door remained the only feasible option. If the murderer had managed to get in, he or she could surely have got out the same way. The door had a snib lock, and the safety chain was not on. The most pressing question therefore was, how had the murderer managed to leave the flat in those few seconds between the shot being heard and the neighbours arriving at the scene? And the second question was, how on earth had the murderer left the building? The second floor was the top floor and the only way down was either the stairs or the lift. If the murderer had taken the stairs, he or she would have met the other neighbours on their way up. The first two neighbours at the scene gave each other an alibi. Any suspicion of a conspiracy between them was groundless given that there was no murder weapon and insufficient time before the other residents appeared. They were all agreed that the lift had been standing on the ground floor both immediately before and after the shot rang out. The lift was empty when the caretaker’s wife hurried past and when the wheelchair-bound resident on the ground floor opened the door a few minutes later. And it was impossible to imagine that anyone had succeeded in using the lift to sneak past the neighbours on their way up and then managed to get past the caretaker’s wife, who was by the entrance.
From half past eleven all available police officers helped to search the flats and building from top to bottom, without finding the weapon or anything else that might help to clear up the murder mystery. The caretaker’s wife had been given four hours’ pay to clean the victim’s flat the previous weekend and had used her time diligently. With the exception of her own fingerprints, the only ones found in the flat were those of Harald Olesen.
Meanwhile, I pondered the possibility that the murderer had actually never been in the flat, but had fired the shot from another building. This theory was, however, flawed, as it would appear that Harald Olesen had been sitting or standing in front of a solid stone wall without a window when the shot was fired. And if that did not make things difficult enough, all the windows in the room were still intact.