In other words, Anton Hansen the caretaker appeared to be precisely what he was: a man who had lived a hard life and who was now dying as a result. His eyes lit up when he saw me, but his face and body both remained heavy and, somehow, disillusioned. He gave an almost imperceptible nod in welcome. He lifted his hand from the bed in greeting, but his handshake was without energy or will. There seemed to be something strangely deformed about his hands. It took a couple of minutes before I realized that not only did he lack teeth, he also lacked nails.
‘Detective Inspector Kolbjørn Kristiansen. I am here, as I am sure you understand, in connection with the unsolved murder of your neighbour Harald Olesen.’
He nodded again. His voice was weak but friendly.
‘I thought I was going to die myself when I heard about the murder. Harald Olesen is one of the people I have admired most in this world, and I never imagined that I would outlive him. I had hoped that he would come to my funeral and still have many years before him.’
He gasped for breath and coughed at the same time, but continued remarkably quickly.
‘During the war, everyone who knew his identity worried that he would be shot any day. But now, so many years later… it came as a shock, and I cannot imagine who would want to kill him. Not anymore.’
His head fell back on the pillow. I discreetly stood up and moved closer to the bed so he could see me without lifting his head. He nodded gratefully.
‘I admired Harald Olesen during the war, of course, but it was actually later that I fully understood just how strong he was. Harald Olesen was a man of action, someone who could always distinguish what was important and what was not, who always looked to the future. He managed to carry on, even though he must have seen things far worse than I did during the war.’
He coughed again, this time so violently that I looked around for a nurse, but then he carried on speaking.
‘My problem was that I remembered everything so clearly, and then you get caught up in what happened and it is impossible to move on – especially when the experiences are as powerful as those I carried with me from the war.’
It seemed to me that Caretaker Anton Hansen was intellectually fitter than he was physically. But now I was impatient to know more about what happened during the war and about his neighbours, before it was too late.
‘It must have been very peculiar for you and Harald Olesen, as former Resistance fighters, to have a convicted NS member as a neighbour.’