back into Norway via Svinesund early one morning a few weeks ago, in a trailer from Spain, hidden behind four pallets of tomato juice.
Ali Khurram must really love her, Silje Sorensen thought to herself as she examined the door that he had pointed out to her. On the other hand, his extreme fear regarding his wife’s fate might also be connected to what his father-law-might do. Even though he lived in Karachi, nearly six thousand kilometres from Oslo, he had already managed to push two lawyers on DI Sorensen. Surprisingly, they had both been very understanding. They could see why a man who had smuggled the American president out of a hotel room in a dirty laundry basket might be asked for an explanation. They had nodded gravely when they were given some insight into the investigation, having been strictly reminded of their duty of confidentiality. One of the lawyers, who himself was of Pakistani origin, had then had a brief and whispered conversation with Ali Khurram in Urdu. The chat was so effective that Khurram had dried his tears and said he was happy to show them where in the cellar he had left the cleaning trolley.
Silje Sorensen looked at the architect’s drawings again. The enormous sheets were difficult to handle. The constable she had with her tried to hold one end, but the stiff paper buckled rebelliously in between them.
‘It’s not shown here,’ the constable said, trying to fold away any parts of the drawings that were not relevant.
‘We are in the right corridor, aren’t we?’
Silje looked around. The neon light on the ceiling was bright and unpleasant. The long corridor ended at a door in the west wall, behind which were some stairs that led up to ground level, two storeys above.
‘There are two basement levels,’ said a middle-aged man, who was nervously biting his puny moustache. ‘This is the lower level. So… yes, we are in the right corridor.’
He was the technical operations manager for the hotel and looked like he was about to crap himself. His legs were trembling nonstop and he couldn’t leave his moustache alone.
‘But it’s not shown on the drawings,’ Silje said, looking at the door with suspicion, as if it had been installed there in contravention of all laws and regulations.
‘Which drawings do you actually have?’ the operations manager asked, and tried to find a date.
‘What do you mean?’ the policeman said, making another attempt to fold the big sheets.
‘He said he was from the Secret Service when he rang my mobile number,’ whimpered Ali Khurram. ‘I couldn’t know that… He showed me his ID and everything! Like the ones you see on TV, with a photo, and stars and… He told me earlier on in the day that I had to come up as soon as he called. Immediately, he said! He was from the Secret Service and all that! I wasn’t to know that-’
‘You should have let us know when you realised what had happened,’ Silje said frostily and turned away from him. ‘You should have raised the alarm immediately. Have you figured it out?’ she asked the operations manager.
‘Yes, but my wife…’ Ali Khurram continued. ‘I was terrified because of… What’s going to happen to my wife? Is she going to have to leave now? Can’t she…’
‘Let’s not go over this again now,’ Silje said and raised a hand. ‘You’ve been explaining yourself for several hours now. The situation won’t change, either for you or your wife, just because you keep going on about it. Stand over there. And keep quiet.’
She pointed firmly at a point on the floor a few metres away from the door. Ali Khurram slunk down the corridor. He had his hands in front of his face and was mumbling in Urdu. The uniformed policeman followed him.
‘You’ve got the wrong drawings,’ the operations manager said finally. ‘These are the originals. From when the hotel was built, I mean. It was finished in 2001. This door wasn’t there then.’
He smiled, which was presumably an attempt to charm her, as if the door was no longer anything to worry about, now that the mystery of the incorrect drawings had been cleared up.
‘The wrong drawings,’ Silje Sorensen repeated, in a flat voice.
‘Yes,’ the operations manager said keenly. ‘Or, well… actually, this door isn’t shown on any of the drawings. We were ordered to make a door from here into the car park, in connection with the building of the opera, you know, with explosions and the like, just in case anything should happen…’
‘Which car park?’ Silje Sorensen asked, exasperated.
‘That one,’ the operations manager said and pointed at the wall.
‘That one?
Silje Sorensen was a rarity: a very rich policewoman. She did what she could to hide her greatest weakness, which was her arrogance, the result of a sheltered childhood and inherited wealth. But she was having great difficulty now.
The operations manager was an idiot.
His jacket was tasteless. Burgundy and badly fitted. His trousers were shiny on the knees. His moustache was ridiculous. His nose was narrow and crooked and reminded her of a beak. And he was crawling to her. Despite the seriousness of the situation, he was smiling all the time. Silje Sorensen felt an almost physical disgust for the man, and when he put his hand on her arm in a gesture of camaraderie, she shrugged it off.
‘
‘The car park for Central Station,’ he explained. ‘There’s no exit there from the hotel. You have to go round. So if the guests-’
‘You just said that this door goes through to there,’ she interrupted and swallowed.
‘Yes.’ He smiled. ‘It does! But it’s not used. We were ordered to make it when they were building the opera, in connection with the excavations.’
‘You’ve already said that.’ She ran her hand over the rather coarsely fitted door frame. ‘Why is there no handle?’
‘As I said, the intention was never to use the door. We were just ordered to make an entrance into the car park. We’ve taken the handle off for security reasons. And as far as I know, it was never added to any drawings.’
He scratched his neck and bent down. Silje could not understand how a door could be used as an emergency exit in the event of an explosion or similar if it couldn’t be opened. But she couldn’t face going into any more detail. Instead she held out her hand for the loose door handle that the operations manager had pulled from a voluminous bag with the hotel’s logo on the side of it.
‘The key,’ she demanded and put the handle in place.
The operations manager obeyed. It only took a couple of seconds to unlock the door. She was careful not to leave any fingerprints. Forensics were already on their way to see if there was still any technical evidence there. She opened the door. The dark smell of parked cars and old exhaust hit them. Silje Sorensen just stood in the doorway and did not go into the car park.
‘The exit’s over there, isn’t it?’ She pointed right, towards the east.
‘Yes. And I might add…’ He was smiling even more now, and his nervousness seemed to ease as he continued: ‘It was the Secret Service themselves who inspected this area. Everything was in perfect order. They even got their own handle and key. For the door and for the lift. They did a very impressive job. They inspected the hotel from top to bottom, several days before the President arrived.’
‘Who did you say got the key and a handle?’ Silje asked him, without turning round.
‘The Secret Service.’
‘Who in the Secret Service?’
‘I… um… who…’ The operations manager laughed nervously. ‘The place was crawling with them. Obviously I didn’t get to know all their names.’
Silje Sorensen finally turned around. She closed the heavy door, pulled the handle out again and put it in her bag, along with the key. From a side pocket she produced a sheet of paper, which she then held up for the operations manager to see.
‘Was it him?’
The man squinted and pushed his face out to get a closer look at the paper, without moving his body. He looked like a vulture.
‘That’s the one! Names escape me, but I never forget a face. Hazard of the job, I guess. In the hotel business-’
