With this entry, the diary stopped abruptly. All the remaining pages were blank.
Harald Olesen was shot during a meeting in his home on the evening of 4 April, which was the first Thursday after 30 March. But I did not know if he had arranged this meeting with D, J, N or O, or who any of them were. None of the initials D, J, N or O fitted the names of anyone in the building. Unless ‘J’ quite simply stood for ‘Jensen’.
I went into Bjørn Erik Svendsen and asked if he had ever heard Harald Olesen mention the initials D, J, N or O, or come across them in any other context. He shook his head without any hesitation. In pure desperation, I read a couple of the entries out loud to him, but this did not help to reveal the identity of the people in question. However, the colour did still drain from Bjørn Erik Svendsen’s face and he told me that in all his conversations with Harald Olesen, he had never heard mention of the words ‘fear’ and ‘terror’. It was therefore a shock to hear just how scared the old Resistance hero had been in the last months of his life.
I ordered Bjørn Erik Svendsen not to say a word about the existence of the diary, something he swore to. I then asked him to remain in town and to contact me immediately should he remember anything that might be of importance regarding the identity of D, J, N or O – or the investigation in general. He assured me that he would, and asked me twice not to mention that he knew about the diary.
A minute later, I saw Bjørn Erik Svendsen almost running along the pavement below the window. I realized how profoundly the murder would affect his life, and even more so, the other residents of 25 Krebs’ Street. It was strange to think how very different the situation would have been for them, as it would for me, if Harald Olesen had been allowed to die from his illness a few days or weeks later.
I sat there alone leafing backwards and forwards through the diary for an hour, but was none the wiser. I desperately missed Patricia’s voice and was several times about to drive to her home unannounced. But when I later got into the car, I headed not towards Erling Skjalgsson’s Street, but towards the hospital. There was a man waiting there who had been given a message to say that I would come today whom no one dared believe would live another day.
Sadly, his wife had been right. There was not much left of Anton Hansen in 1968, compared with the handsome, dark-haired groom in the photograph from 1928. Forty years later, the same person was a worn and grey bag of bones lying in a white hospital bed. I would have guessed his age to be no less than seventy-five and his weight well under nine stone, despite the fact that he was still at least five foot ten. His hair was grey, his skin pallid, his breathing laboured and his mouth toothless. He had one tube in his left arm and another up his nose, but as he was constantly coughing, they were constantly in danger of falling out.