As agreed, they arrived at the steel plant Monday morning at ten and were met at security just left of the main gate. An elderly man and a younger woman were standing behind Leo Andresen, so apparently they were taking the tour seriously.
Leo smiled and pointed at the skinny man. “Yeah, Polle P. is the oldest former employee from here, I worked here for thirty years before retiring, and Lana here is the newest recruit at the plant, so together we should be able to answer any questions you might have about the place over the years.”
They all shook hands.
“Polle and I will lead the tour, and Lana is our security officer, so in a minute she’ll provide you with hard hats and safety shoes. Dare I ask your shoe sizes, gentlemen?”
All three of them looked down at Assad’s and Carl’s feet.
“May I suggest a size forty-five for you, Carl, and a forty-one for Assad?” continued Leo.
“You may,” said Assad, “but if I don’t get a forty-two, you might as well kill me straightaway.” He was the only one to laugh.
They left security, and Carl filled them in about their meeting with Benny Andersson. Judging by their reserved expressions, Andersson didn’t require any introduction.
“He was one of the people who received compensation for manganese poisoning,” snarled Polle. “I don’t know about the others, but Benny definitely didn’t have manganese poisoning, if you ask me.”
“Who cares? It got rid of him,” added Leo, understandably.
“No, he’s certainly no heartbreaker,” said Carl. “But I have the impression that he was fond of Rose, so he can’t be all bad. Do you know what their relationship was with each other?”
“Nothing, I think. He just liked women and really hated Arne Knudsen.”
“Do you know why?”
“Most of us did, to be honest. Arne wasn’t nice to anyone, and especially not Rose. That was clear to everyone who came in contact with them. She shouldn’t have been working so closely with her dad,” said Polle, throwing out one arm in presentation as they turned a corner and the vastness of the plant appeared before them.
The open areas around the buildings were orderly and surprisingly empty considering the enormous amount of steel that passed through the plant. Where were the three hundred and forty employees? There was no one in sight. Even though the area was the size of a small island and the buildings as huge as aircraft hangars, capable of accommodating thousands of people, three hundred and forty people couldn’t just disappear. Carl had imagined mountains of scrap, noise from every corner, and strapping men in coveralls swarming around the place.
Leo Andresen laughed. “It’s probably not like you imagined it. Things have changed now. The plant is run electronically nowadays. Highly skilled employees sitting with joysticks, pushing buttons, and looking at monitors. That’s the way it’s been since we stopped melting scrap metal ourselves. Now it’s an export company owned by the Russians, and—”
“And how was it in 1999 when Arne Knudsen died?” interrupted Carl.
“Very, very different, and yet not,” said Polle. “First of all, we were more than a thousand employees. There’s another company out there on the peninsula now, but back then we were all part of the same organization owned by the investment companies A. P. M?ller and EAC. And then came that damn manganese case and a lot of other stuff at the same time, making the company less profitable. In 2002, we went bankrupt. That was the end of an era.”
He pointed at a row of stacked, thick steel slabs lying on the concrete floor in the open air.
“Back then, we were a recycling company that bought eight hundred thousand tons of scrap metal a year, melted it, and processed it into sheets, bars, and reinforcing steel. We provided material for bridges and tunnels and all sorts. Today, we receive those Russian slabs you can see lying there, with the one aim of rolling them into sheets.”
He opened the door into one of the production areas, which was so huge that Assad put his hand to his hard hat in shock. Carl couldn’t take in the sheer size of the place.
“Did the accident happen here?” He pointed at the conveyor belt where the slabs were brought into position, lifted up by cranes with enormous magnets, and transported to other positions. “Was it a whopper like that which killed Arne Knudsen?” he asked.
Polle shook his head. “No, and it didn’t happen here either. It was down in the old part of W15. This one is a twenty-ton slab, but the one that killed Arne was only half as heavy.” He shrugged. It was still more than enough.
“If Rose still worked here, she’d probably be in that office now,” he said as they reached the corner of the hall where a glass partition separated the imposing raw area from a typical factory office. He pointed inside at a pretty young woman wearing blue coveralls looking at a computer screen. They waved at each other. “That’s Micha. She’s a feeder operator—the same job Rose was apprenticed to with her dad. He was a feeder operator too. They’re the people responsible for the numbered slabs being processed in a specific order. Everything in here is preordered. We know exactly when and what to deliver, and who it’s for and where it’s going. We mark the individual slabs with white numbers and letters, heat them up, and roll them into sheets in the desired dimensions. But you can see all that in a minute.”
As they neared the end of the hall, the light changed from cool and efficient to dim and yellowish.
This part of section W15 was much more primitive and more like Carl had imagined. Ingenious iron constructions, bridges, pipes, steel staircases, hoisting devices, slide bars, and a furnace that almost looked like a futuristic miniature version of the silos on his father’s farm.
Leo Andresen pointed up at one of the cranes above their heads, hanging from a mass of steel wire, a huge machine by Demag. “It lifts the slabs up from the ground and over to the conveyor belt, which transports them directly into the pusher furnaces. Look, the hatch is opening now so you’ll be able to feel the heat. We heat it up to twelve hundred degrees, enough to produce molten slabs.”
The group was all silent as they watched the magnet. “That’s the one that dropped the slab on Arne Knudsen,” said Polle. “It was a chance power cut, they said, but how much you can put it down to chance, I don’t know.”
“Okay. And who operates a machine like that?” asked Carl as he stepped back from the almost unbearable heat emanating from the furnace. Now he understood why the end wall in the hall led directly out into the open air.
“The people who operate the control panel in the control cabin on the other side of the pusher furnace.”
“And who was sitting there on that day?” asked Assad.
“Yes, that’s the question. It was in the middle of a shift handover. To be honest, this shouldn’t be possible, but we don’t know exactly who was sitting in there.”
“We asked Benny Andersson, and he says it wasn’t him in the control cabin.”