The Radio 4 studio was located in Lille Grensen, the street running diagonally through Akersgata and Karl Johans gate – only a stone’s throw from Stortinget subway station. It took Blix no more than a couple of minutes to cover the distance from the steps where Ragnar Ole Theodorsen had been shot.
He met Kovic outside the entrance.
‘Why are we here?’ she asked.
‘I’m not certain it’s anything important. Just come in with me, and I’ll fill you in later.’
The receptionist needed no explanation as to why they were there, and the radio station staff didn’t seemed surprised when Blix and Kovic entered the editorial room on the first floor. People just stopped talking. Dried their tears.
Blix approached the first person he came across, a young man who didn’t look more than twenty. His eyes were bloodshot.141
‘Who can I talk to?’ Blix asked, showing his ID badge. The young man pointed to a short female in her mid-forties. She was still sobbing when Blix introduced himself.
‘Victoria Løke,’ she said. ‘I’m Calle’s producer. Or at least – I was.’
Blix introduced Kovic before going on to ask: ‘Do you know what happened to him?’
She shook her head and shrugged. ‘He just collapsed.’
‘All of a sudden?’
‘Yes.’
‘No sign beforehand that he was in any pain?’
‘He didn’t seem too well earlier,’ Løke said. ‘He was a bit distant, maybe. Unfocused. And just before he died he was speaking more slowly than usual. He seemed short of breath.’
Kovic looked at Blix with puzzlement in her eyes.
‘Who has he been in contact with today?’ he asked.
‘Apart from all of us working here, you mean?’
‘Yes?’
‘Well, there were a couple of guests. A professor of sociology and a parliamentarian. Just a normal working day.’
Blix nodded. ‘Do you have any surveillance cameras here?’ he asked, hoping there might be footage of Seeberg as he collapsed, or – best of all – just before.
‘Not in the editorial room.’
‘What about the studio?’
‘We’ve got a couple of web cams, but we only use them if we have special guests. Someone who’s going to sing a song, for example, live on air. Then we film it and put it out on the Internet. But we haven’t done any filming today.’
‘But the actual radio recording, Seeberg’s last broadcast – you must have that?’
‘All our broadcasts are stored on hard disk. We send out all our shows as podcasts afterwards, but we haven’t done that this time, of course.’
‘Can you show us the studio where he was sitting?’142
She nodded and showed them to an open door. In the studio they saw three chairs around a table. Three microphones and three sets of headphones. Løke indicated the seat behind the computer screen.
Blix went inside and looked around. A notepad, transmission schedules, two ballpoint pens, a coffee cup and a glass of water. That was all. Scattered on the floor was paraphernalia left behind by the paramedics who had performed CPR. A pair of single-use gloves and the paper packaging that must have been around the sterile equipment.
‘Can you close off this room until we’ve examined it more thoroughly?’
‘Yes, yes of course.’
‘And I’d like to hear that last recording you have of him.’
Løke nodded and ushered them into her own office, where she sat down and searched through a folder.
‘Here it is,’ she said, starting to play a sound file and turning up the volume.
Calle Seeberg’s well-known voice filled the room. There was something different about him, though. He welcomed the listeners back and told his audience, slowly and in a listless voice, what he wanted to talk about for the next half-hour. Then he tried to introduce Highasakite. He needed three attempts, and laughed it off by saying what an incredibly difficult name it was for a Norwegian band, but there was nothing breezy or cheerful about his words, and he was obviously having breathing difficulties. His chest was wheezy.
The song began. Løke fast-forwarded until it was finished.
‘This is when it happens,’ she said.
Blix concentrated. Normally Seeberg would have repeated the name of the tune listeners had just heard, but now it sounded as if he was only stuttering, as if he couldn’t get out a single word. Then he began to make a gurgling noise before something hit the table surface with a bang. Followed by the sound of a chair toppling and then the thump of Calle Seeberg’s heavy body as it landed on the floor.143
For a second all was silence and then someone shouted his name. Other sounds filled the room. The patter of feet and chairs being scraped aside. Victoria Løke grimaced as if she couldn’t bear to hear any more.
‘Lay him on his back,’ someone said.
‘He’s not breathing!’ a woman shrieked. ‘Call an ambulance!’
Swearing.
‘Calle! Can you hear me?’
‘We’re still on air.’
More swearing. Then music began to play. Løke turned down the sound.
‘It’s absolutely dreadful,’ she said. ‘Fortunately, I didn’t see it, I only heard it. I ran into the studio when I realised what had happened.’ She shook her head. ‘It’s the worst thing I’ve ever experienced.’
‘Did you try to revive him?’
‘Yes, of course,’ she said indignantly. ‘For ages. We kept going right up until the paramedics arrived.’
The song continued to play in the background.’
‘We’ve heard enough, thank you,’ Blix said.
‘He couldn’t breathe,’ Kovic commented when the room was quiet again.
‘That’s how it sounded, anyway,’ Blix agreed. ‘Can you show me his workstation?’
‘Of course.’
Løke led them back out into the editorial room and towards a desk partly enclosed by two-metre-high dividers. The desktop was strewn with papers, notepads and cables. Pile upon pile of documents, books and magazines. Two cups of cold coffee. Blix took note of a photograph of a girl who, in the photo at least, couldn’t be more than fourteen years old. He had a similar photo of Iselin on his desk.
People had bad turns all the time, Blix thought, his thoughts straying to Emma’s countdown theory. Even radio hosts could just drop dead.
His eyes came to rest on a white envelope with Calle Seeberg’s 144name handwritten on it. Blix picked it up. Turned it over and saw that Seeberg hadn’t opened it. There was no stamp on the front either. Blix squeezed the envelope. There was something inside it: it felt like a photograph.
‘Fan letter?’ Blix asked, turning to Løke.
‘Not inconceivable,’ Løke told him. ‘He still gets a lot of fan mail.’
‘Physical, though? People don’t just send an email or a text message?’
‘Most people, perhaps. A few are still old-fashioned.’
Blix turned over the envelope again. No sender’s name on the reverse.
‘It arrived by courier earlier today,’ a woman at the desk opposite volunteered.
Blix lifted his head to look at her. A woman in her mid-twenties wearing a headset.
‘How long ago was that?’ Blix asked.
‘Er, a couple of hours, maybe. No, wait. It’s less than that. I’d just been out on a job when I heard the courier say he had an envelope to deliver to Calle Seeberg. I brought it up with me from reception.’
Blix’s brow furrowed. He opened the envelope and took out the photo.
And gasped.
It was a number four.
In grey tones and black and white. The number four was in the middle, with a white circle around it. On the sides of the photo, grey squares. It looked like a still from the countdown at the start of an old, silent film.
‘Where did the courier come from?’ he asked, aware at once of a slight quiver in his voice.
The woman shrugged. ‘I don’t think he was wearing a uniform,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to ask at reception.’
‘What did he look like?’ he went on. ‘What was he wearing?’
The woman gave this some thought. ‘A black rain jacket,’ she said at last.145
Blix glanced at Kovic.
‘And a grey cap. I didn’t see him very well, because he had a hood pulled over his head.’
‘Over a cap?’
‘Yes.’
Blix peered down at the picture with the number four on it, regretting that he wasn’t wearing gloves.
‘Thanks,’ he said, nodding at the woman with the headset and returning the photo to the envelope.
He turned to face Kovic. ‘I think Calle Seeberg is another number in a sequence,’ he said, recognising that she was brimming with questions.
Before she had a chance to say anything, he addressed himself to Løke again. ‘The CCTV footage from reception,’ he said. ‘I need to see it. Right now.’