Some situations are, shall we say, more delicate than others. Like here in son’s bedroom, when more than 10 million dollars in small bills are discovered in the chalet of a former Minister of Health who has just died suddenly.
The discovery leads at least the Attorney General of Norway to entrust Inspector Wisting with a priority mission: to discover where this money comes from and to uncover the link between the missing person and the hidden treasure.
Just enough time to discreetly retrieve the banknotes, place them in a safe place and find their provenance… the isolated chalet on the edge of a lake is completely destroyed by an arson attack. Quickly, Wisting set up a special team, including his daughter Line, an investigative journalist – who we have already seen at work in Katharina’s Code.
Synchronicity
The improbable little group first eliminates from the list of suspects the political party and then the union in which the ex-minister was active; his officials themselves alerted the prosecutor after finding the money on the day of the death.
However, we managed to identify the source of the loot – a robbery that was never resolved – but nothing that could implicate the minister who died of cardiac arrest.
By digging around what we have been able to reconstruct of the burglary, a new element appears: a still unexplained disappearance that occurred the same day in the region. The synchronicity of these two unresolved cases occurring at the same time, in the same perimeter, puts a flea in the ear of Wisting.
At the same time, members of the team begin to methodically dig into the career and then the life of the minister. The former trade unionist never had it easy: his wife died of a rare disease when he headed the Ministry of Health and then his son was killed in a motorcycle accident. However, it was in the latter’s room (hence the title) that the money was hidden in nine cardboard boxes; it is by looking into him and his mother’s congenital illness that the investigators discover the first elements of a solution.
Quarter turn
We will not tell you more except that, as usual, this investigation by Inspector Wisting is a remarkable police investigation, methodical and intelligent, as we see too little.
Efficient and well-oiled, Horst’s writing, meticulously rendered by Aude Pasquier’s translation, is based on a gallery of credible and resolute characters, even on the “bad guys” side.
There is this annoying and unlikely little detail of an investigative journalist, even effective, being part of an elite police unit… but that’s it; everything else is absolutely flawless and runs like clockwork.