Murder on the Thirty-First Floor Read Online Free PDF Page B

late.’
    Inspector Jensen nodded.
    The doctor’s eyelids were swollen and red-rimmed, his eyelashes caked with lumps of yellowish matter.
    He gave Jensen a thoughtful look and said:
    ‘Is it true what they say, that you’ve never failed to solve a case?’
    ‘Yes,’ said Jensen. ‘That’s right.’

CHAPTER 7
    On the desk in his office lay the magazines he had asked for. One hundred and forty-four of them, stacked in four piles of thirty-six.
    Inspector Jensen drank another cup of bicarbonate of soda and loosened his belt a notch further. Then he sat down at his desk and started to read.
    The magazines varied somewhat in design, format and number of pages. Some of them were printed on glossy paper, others not. A comparison showed that this seemed to be the determining factor in the price.
    They all had brightly coloured cover pictures, of cowboy heroes, the super-successful, members of the royal family, popular singers, famous politicians, children and animals. The children and animals were often in the same picture, in various combinations: little girls with kittens; little blond-haired boys with puppies; little boys with very big dogs; and older, almost fully grown girls with very small cats. The people in the cover pictures were attractive and blue-eyed. They had smooth, friendly faces, even the children and animals. When he got out his magnifying glass and studied the pictures more closely, he noticed that the faces had some strangely lifeless areas, as if something had been erased from the photographs; warts for example, or blackheads or bruises.
    Inspector Jensen read the magazines as if they were reports,quickly but carefully, not skipping anything except what he was sure he already knew. Within an hour or so, he noticed certain elements recurred more and more frequently.
    By half past eleven he had worked his way through seventy-two of the magazines, exactly half. He went down to the reception area, exchanged a few words with the officer on telephone duty, and had a cup of tea in the canteen. Despite the steel doors and solid brick walls, the sound of indignant yells and terrified howls forced its way up from the basement. As he went back to his room, he noticed that the officer in the green linen uniform was reading an issue of one of the magazines he had been studying. There were three more on the shelf under the desk.
    It took him only a third of the time to go through the remaining half of the magazines. It was twenty to three as he turned the final glossy page and contemplated the last friendly face.
    He ran his fingertips lightly over his cheeks and noted that the skin felt tired and slack under the stubble. He wasn’t particularly sleepy and was still in sufficient pain from the tea not to want to eat.
    He let himself slump a little, putting his left elbow on the arm of the chair and resting his cheek in the palm of his hand as he looked through the magazines.
    He had read nothing that was of any interest to him, but neither had he read anything at all that was nasty, troubling or disagreeable. Nor anything that had made him happy, angry, sad or surprised. He had accessed a series of pieces of information, mainly about cars and a variety of people in prominent positions, but none of it was of a kind that might be expected to influence anyone’s behaviour or attitude. There wascriticism, but it was directed almost exclusively at notorious psychopaths of history, and very occasionally at the situation in some distant country, always expressed in vague and very moderate terms.
    Questions were debated, generally things that had happened in television shows, like someone swearing, or appearing with a beard or untidy hair. Stories such as these were often quite prominent, but they were always dealt with in a spirit of conciliation and understanding, clearly demonstrating that there was no call for criticism. It was an assumption that generally seemed very ready to hand.
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