Siri Holm woke up alone in the small basement room. She raised her head and looked around at the mess. This was Gunnar Berg’s den far from home. She touched the lump on the back of her head and thought back to the previous evening.
She had regained consciousness a few minutes after hitting her head on the table. Gunnar leaned over her, holding a glass of water. He’d already splashed some of it on her face.
“You slipped on a tube of caviar,” he explained. “It split open and it was really slippery. I tried to catch you. Maybe I should have warned you about the mess. It’s only at work and at home that I’m the world’s neatest man. This place is my dark secret. When I’m here, I don’t have time to clean up.”
“What on earth are you working on here?”
“I’m building a studio,” he said. “I have some friends who play folk music, and I promised to build a real studio for them so they can record their songs. I studied electronics before I switched to history. It’s a long-term project. I bought an old mixing console, which I’m trying to repair.”
She now realized how much she’d misjudged him. He wasn’t the awful stick-in-the-mud she’d always thought he was. She knew instantly that from now on she would like him. The old Siri, the one who wasn’t pregnant, would have tried to seduce him. But lately, she’d put those sorts of ideas aside.
Instead, they’d sat and talked about ballads and Felicia’s genealogy search and the fact that it seemed to have a lot to do with the two cases that had shocked the city. Finally Siri had asked him about the police log. Gunnar didn’t know much about it, but that was when he’d made a suggestion. It was an excellent suggestion, and she’d been even more impressed by him. He’d brought his laptop along, so they had access to all the databases they needed.
They’d sat up half the night in that gloriously messy basement room of his, the partially built music studio. They’d eaten caviar sandwiches as they searched through the library’s secrets. After she had fallen asleep on a threadbare couch, he’d gone home. So when she woke up, she had the place to herself. And she knew instantly what she had to do, so she took out her phone.
Singsaker was sitting in his car, trying to convince himself that the three shots of aquavit he’d had early that morning must have worn off long ago, so he could safely drive home. Then his phone rang.
“Hi, it’s Siri.” To his great surprise, he was happy to hear her voice. He didn’t know what it was about Siri Holm, but it was impossible to stay mad at her.
“Hi,” he replied.
“I’ve been trying to call Felicia,” she said. “Her cell has been switched off for ages. It’s not like her. But right now you’re the one I want to talk to.”
“Okay, let’s hear it.” He kept his tone curt, not sure he could handle anything else at the moment.
Then she told him about the missing police log.
He thought it fit the pattern.
“He steals historical sources connected to this Jon Blund, and at the same time he pretends to be a figure from Bellman’s ballad universe. But we already knew that. In fact, we’re more convinced than ever that Grälmakar Löfberg is our perpetrator,” Singsaker said. He had an urge to tell Siri that he’d just received a tip about who this man might be, and now he was sitting in the car, about to pay him a visit.
“But that’s exactly why I’m calling you. I know who Grälmakar Löfberg is,” she said.
Singsaker tightened his grip on the phone.
“What did you say?”
“I found him.”
“Why didn’t you tell us this before?”
“We just found out.”
“We?”
“Yes. My colleague and I were up researching all night.”
“Explain.”
“I was thinking that we really only knew two things about this Löfberg guy. First, that he’s obsessed with Jon Blund. And second, that he seems to have free access to borrow books.”
“Actually, he prefers to steal them.”
“Right. Or he neglects to return them.”
There were times when Singsaker felt like his brain was functioning better than ever before. This was one of those moments.
“He’s borrowed other books, is that it?”
“What I’m telling you now, I’m technically not allowed to say. The laws about confidentiality, and all that.”
“Don’t tell me that librarians have those rules too,” he joked, hoping it didn’t sound like he was flirting.
“I’ve gone through all the lender files. Looking for books that weren’t returned, and then filtering by various topics like the eighteenth century, ballads, Bellman, Jon Blund, and music boxes. Only one person has received overdue notices and letters demanding replacement fees for books within more than one of these subject areas.”
“And who’s that?”
“His name is Jonas Røed. I Googled him.”
She told Singsaker a little about what she’d found out about Røed, who worked at the Ringve Museum. Significant factual details, although Google could tell them little about the man’s mental state.
“Siri, you’re amazing,” he said, forgetting everything else. She was one of a kind, quite simply the sharpest knife in the drawer. It was impossible not to love her, at least a little bit.
He didn’t tell her he’d already heard the same name from Jan Høybråten, or that he knew who Røed was, or that he’d actually spoken to the man when he’d had the music box appraised early on in the investigation.
Høybråten had told the police that he’d been at Ringve right after the letter was found, before it was sent on to the Gunnerus Library, and he happened to see Røed put the letter in his pocket. Unfortunately for Høybråten and the present investigation, during the previous year Røed, for his part, had seen the professor get a little too intimate with a girl after choir practice in Ringve. That was enough to make him keep his mouth shut.
But all Singsaker said to Siri Holm was, “Thanks.”
“I do my best, you know,” she said. “But there’s one more thing.”
“What’s that?”
“What’s going on with Felicia?”
“Let’s talk about this later, okay?” he said, wondering what he would say if he tried to tell the truth.