The Human Flies

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In 1968,4 April fell on the Thursday before Easter. At lunch, I marked the not-so-insignificant three-month anniversary of my move to a new, larger office at the main police station in 19 Mರller Street by eating a piece of cake on my own. The date is generally remembered as the night when civil rights campaigner Martin Luther King was shot and killed on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee, unleashing a wave of racialist strife across the USA.

Of lesser interest to the history books, but of greater significance to my own life and that of those affected, was a murder that took place at almost the same time in a flat in Torshov, on the east side of Oslo. Thursday, 4 April 1968 was one of those days when the phone at home in my flat in Hegdehaugen rang late, and an impatient voice promptly talking to ‘Detective Inspector Kolbjørn Kristiansen’. It was just before eleven o’clock in the evening when the out-of-breath police constable Asbjørn Eriksen phoned to report that an elderly man had been shot and killed in his flat in 25 Krebs’ Street. The circumstances were ‘highly unusual’, according to the overwrought Eriksen. I had always regarded Eriksen as an unpretentious and levelheaded constable, so I felt the excitement surge through me even before he mentioned the victim’s name. It was only a matter of seconds after he had said, ‘It’s Harald Olesen!’ before I was out of the door and in the gathering dark, racing towards my car.

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