Headhunters Read Free

pervade interview rooms in this branch of work.
    ‘But at least it was Clive Christian,’ I said. ‘Bought by his wife, like the suit, the shoes, the shirt and the tie. And it was her idea to dye his temples grey.’
    ‘How do you know?’ Ferdinand took a seat in the chair Lander had been sitting in, but jumped up again with an expression of revulsion as he felt the clammy body heat that still clung to the upholstery.
    ‘He went as white as a sheet when I pressed the wife button,’ I answered. ‘I mentioned how disappointed she would be when he told her the job wouldn’t be his.’
    ‘The wife button! Where do you get this stuff from, Roger?’ Ferdinand had settled into one of the other chairs, his feet on a pretty good copy of a Noguchi coffee table. He had taken an orange and was peeling it, releasing an almost invisible spray which covered his newly ironed shirt. Ferdinand was unbelievably slapdash for a homosexual. And unbelievably homosexual for a headhunter.
    ‘Inbau, Reid and Buckley,’ I said.
    ‘You’ve mentioned that method before,’ Ferdinand said. ‘But what exactly is it? Is it better than Cuté?’
    I laughed. ‘It’s the FBI’s nine-step interrogation model. It’s a machine gun in the world of pea-shooters, an instrument that would blast a hole through a haystack, that doesn’t take prisoners, but gives quick, tangible results.’
    ‘And what results are they, Roger?’
    I knew what Ferdinand was fishing for, and that was fine by me. He wanted to find out what gave me the edge, what made me the best and him – for the time being – less than the best. And I gave him what he sought. For those were the rules, knowledge was to be shared. And because he would never be better than me. He’d always turn up with shirts reeking of citrus, forever wondering whether someone had a model, a method or a secret that was better than his.
    ‘Submission,’ I answered. ‘Confession. Truth. It’s based on very simple principles.’
    ‘Such as?’
    ‘Such as beginning by questioning the suspect about his family.’
    ‘Pah,’ Ferdinand said. ‘I do that as well. It makes them feel secure if they can talk about something familiar, something close to them. Plus it opens them up.’
    ‘Precisely. But it also allows you to probe their weak points. Their Achilles heel. Which you will be able to use later on in the interrogation.’
    ‘Hey, what terminology!’
    ‘Later on in the interrogation when you have to discuss what rankles, what happened, the murder he is suspected of having committed, what makes him feel lonely and abandoned by everyone and what makes him want to hide, you make sure you have a roll of kitchen towel on the table, positioned just out of the suspect’s reach.’
    ‘Why?’
    ‘Because the interrogation has come to its natural crescendo and the time has come for you to press the emotion button. You ask him what his children will think when they find out that their dad is a murderer. And then, when the tears well up in his eyes, you pass him the roll. You have to be the person who understands, who wants to help, in whom he can confide about all the bad things. About that silly, silly murder that just happened, as if of its own accord.’
    ‘Murder? What the hell are you on about? We recruit people, don’t we? We’re not trying to convict them of murder.’
    ‘I am,’ I said, taking my jacket from the office chair. ‘And that’s why I’m the best headhunter in Oslo. By the way, I’ve put you down for the interview with Lander and the client tomorrow at twelve.’
    ‘Me?’
    I went out of the door and down the corridor with Ferdinand skipping after me as we passed the other twenty-five offices that constituted Alfa, a medium-sized recruitment company that had survived for fifteen years and brought in between fifteen and twenty million kroner per annum, which, after a far too modest bonus had been paid out to the best of us, was pocketed by the owner in