The Cabin

by Jorn Lier Horst

  Wisting took out the notepad he had used on the night of the fire. ‘Fast-forward the video to around six o’clock,’ he said.

  Mortensen did as requested. The cabin was completely ablaze and fire fighters were hosing it with water. ‘What is it you’re looking for?’

  Wisting did not reply but instead stared at the screen until he watched himself enter the frame and stand in front of the security van, staring at the camera on the front windscreen.

  ‘There!’ he said when he saw himself raise his hand and look at his wristwatch before jotting something down on his notepad.

  Mortensen stopped the film. The clock showed five minutes and eleven seconds past six. Wisting held up his notepad on which he had written 6.01.07.

  ‘The clock on the dashboard is nearly five minutes fast,’ he concluded. ‘We’re looking for a van passing here around 5.44.’

  Mortensen nodded as he closed the laptop lid. ‘I should be able to get some answers by lunchtime tomorrow,’ he said.

  14

  Amalie had fallen asleep with her dummy in her mouth. Line rose from the edge of the bed, crossed to the window and leaned her forehead against the glass. It was growing dark and the air from the opening at the bottom of the window was refreshingly cool.

  She had not wanted to admit it earlier, but she regretted having left her job as a journalist with VG. It had been a choice between heart and head, and common sense had prevailed. She was a single mother and it was difficult to combine that with the hectic daily life of a journalist, but she missed her work. Bernhard Clausen and his hoard of cash had made her realize that.

  Further up the street, her father’s car swung round in front of his house. She pulled down the roller blind, returned to her daughter’s bedside and coaxed the dummy from her mouth.

  Amalie had slept in her own room since the start of summer and her cot had been replaced by a child’s bed. All the same, during the night she usually found her way in to her mother, and Line had let her sleep there, even though it was a bad habit that might prove difficult to break, just as with the dummy.

  Kissing her daughter on the cheek, she tiptoed out and put on some soft music before starting to tidy up the toys in the living room.

  All of a sudden her father was standing in the kitchen doorway. ‘I did knock,’ he said, sotto voce, pointing at the front door and glancing towards Amalie’s room at the same time.

  ‘She’s asleep,’ Line reassured him.

  He had brought his notepad and iPad. ‘Can we sit down?’ he asked.

  Line gestured to the settee. ‘Is there some news?’

  Without answering, her father sat down and located a picture on his iPad. Line took a seat beside him. ‘This is from the back room,’ he explained.

  The image showed the bunk beds with the cardboard boxes full of money. Wisting used two fingers to enlarge part of the image. A petrol tank.

  ‘This was stolen from one of the neighbouring cabins two years ago,’ he said, showing her a picture of the cupboard’s interior. The propane-gas canisters were at the bottom and a shelf was filled with various spray cans.

  ‘There were petrol tanks under the bed, too,’ her father went on, while he found a photo showing the holes that had been hidden by a poster on the wall.

  ‘The window was nailed shut, but new air vents had been fitted,’ Wisting added. ‘Everything was arranged so that a fire would develop at breakneck speed.’

  ‘So the fire wasn’t just deliberate, it had been well prepared,’ Line said slowly. ‘Have you come any further in identifying the van spotted on the road?’

  ‘Mortensen will have some answers from the toll company tomorrow,’ her father replied, explaining how they had arrived at an approximate time for the van to pass through.

  She realized from his demeanour that there was something else, but he was at a loss as to where to begin. ‘Do you have any theories on what this whole case is about?’ she asked.

  ‘Everything points to the year following his wife’s death and the time before his son was killed,’ he answered. ‘There is one incident from that period which is particularly interesting.’

  Line was getting up from the settee to fetch something for them to drink but sat down again. ‘What’s that?’ she asked.

  ‘The robbery at Gardermoen airport in 2003,’ Wisting continued. ‘It remains unsolved and the money was never found.’

  Line had a vague memory of a robbery at the airport. ‘I was only nineteen then,’ she said by way of excuse, and asked him to go on.

  ‘It was a cash consignment that arrived by plane from Switzerland and was to be transported onwards to DNB bank and the Norwegian Mail headquarters in Oslo. The robbers got in through a gate in the fence, drove out on to the runway and attacked the plane as the money was being unloaded. The cash was in euros, dollars and pounds.’

  She studied her father’s face. The theft of the money was obviously something he had been thinking about since day one, but for some reason he had been unwilling to share it until now. ‘Were there any suspects?’ she asked.

  ‘There was a circle of organized robbers at that time, with links to the motorbike fraternity, but no arrests were made.’

  ‘The son,’ Line said. ‘Lennart Clausen.’

  ‘That’s a possibility,’ her father said, nodding. ‘But the amount doesn’t fit. Clausen had more than 80 million kroner altogether; the proceeds from the robbery were no more than 70 million or so. But there’s another case that might be of interest, from a timing point of view at least.’

  Line tucked her legs up under herself on the settee.

  ‘The Director General turned up while Mortensen and I were out at the site of the fire today,’ he went on. ‘In the summer of 2003 he received a letter mentioning Bernhard Clausen’s name.’

  He handed her the iPad with a picture of the letter. ‘Check Health Minister Bernhard Clausen re: the Gjersjø case,’ she read out.

  ‘Simon Meier disappeared while on a fishing trip at Gjersjø lake,’ her father clarified. ‘He was last seen on the afternoon of Thursday 29 May 2003. The robbery took place that same afternoon.’

  He moved on to show her a similar letter and a newspaper cutting with a picture of Simon Meier and a summary of the fruitless search for him. Line took over the iPad and read the first few paragraphs. The disappearance had been investigated as suspicious.

  ‘Was Clausen eliminated from the case?’ she asked.

  ‘The tip-off was sent on to the local police station,’ Wisting told her. ‘But I don’t know whether they questioned him at all.’

  ‘Is it possible to find out who sent the letters?’

  ‘Mortensen is examining them for DNA and fingerprints, but it’s doubtful if anything will come of that.’

  ‘Could there be anything in it?’

  ‘When the Director General received the letter it was regarded as one of the usual conspiracy letters, but now it really has to be looked at in a different light.’

  Line read the letter one more time. ‘This isn’t from a conspiracy theorist,’ she said. ‘I had heaps of them at VG: page after page, usually with a copy to the King, the Prime Minister and various Members of Parliament. This is quite different in tone.’

  She gave him back the iPad. ‘We must have the case files sent over,’ she said. ‘Both the airport robbery and the missing-person case.’

  Her father nodded his head. ‘There’s a problem, though,’ he said.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘The missing-person case isn’t in the archives – it’s been sent to the Cold Cases Group at Kripos for evaluation.’

  ‘The Cold Cases Group?’

  ‘It’s really just a routine re-examination, but it will spark off a lot of questions if we ask to borrow the files,’ Wisting explained. ‘The case we’re working on is too confidential to let that happen.’

  ‘So what do we do?’

  ‘I thought you could do it,’ her father replied. ‘You could write about th
e old disappearance and contact the Cold Cases Group for access to information. You know the investigator with responsibility for the case.’

  ‘Adrian Stiller?’

  Her father confirmed this.

  A year ago, Adrian Stiller had led some work in cooperation with VG regarding the reopening of an old kidnapping case. Line had made a podcast and a series of articles on the investigation about a young woman named Nadia Krogh who had been kidnapped on her way home from a party. It had taken Line a while to realize that Stiller had a hidden agenda whereby he used her work to provoke a confession from the suspect.

  ‘The roles are reversed now,’ her father pointed out. ‘You’re the one who can hold the cards close to your chest.’

  Line relished the idea, as well as the journalistic opportunity. A forgotten disappearance, an unsolved crime mystery, these were the stories she loved to work on, and the connection to Bernhard Clausen meant there would be aspects of the story that had never previously been considered.

  ‘I’ll phone Stiller tomorrow,’ she said. ‘Then you’ll have to get hold of the case files for the airport robbery.’

  Wisting stood up, pointing questioningly at the room where Amalie was sleeping. Nodding, Line remained seated as her father padded in to his granddaughter, and her gaze rested on an oversized clock on the wall beside the TV. A thought began to take shape.

  ‘She’s fast asleep,’ he said when he re-emerged.

  ‘Have you adjusted the value of the currencies?’ Line asked.

  Her father did not understand.

  ‘You said the clock on the security guard’s dash camera was fast,’ Line explained. ‘That you had to adjust the time to arrive at the correct time for the toll station.’

  ‘All the same, we need to give a lot of leeway either side,’ Wisting told her. ‘And we can’t be certain that the van drove that route.’

  ‘Talking of changing the parameters made me think of the stolen money,’ Line said. ‘Have you calculated the sum using the currency exchange rate from 2003? The Norwegian krone has weakened since that time.’

  Her father stared at her as he sat down again before picking up his iPad.

  ‘The dollar was down around six kroner,’ he said before long, glancing up from the iPad. ‘The euro was at six as well.’

  He produced his notepad and began to count. ‘You’re right,’ he said, looking across at her. ‘The currency-exchange adjustments amount to almost 10 million. It could well be the money from the robbery.’

  15

  The sky had clouded over during the night, and in the early hours of morning it began to rain. Wisting sat at the kitchen table reading Clausen’s cabin guest book from 2000 to 2006.

  Lengthy spells of those summers had been spent at the cabin and Wisting knew a great deal had happened during those years. Clausen had been appointed Health Minister, his wife and son had died, and he had taken a break from politics before returning two years later as Minister of Foreign Affairs. The guest list was extensive. Many of the people who had visited had been unknown names at that time but had later become central figures in Norwegian politics.

  Two thousand and three was the first summer after Lisa Clausen’s death. The messages in the guest book were fewer and of a different tone. One weekend at the beginning of June, a whole bunch of Party veterans had gathered to work on a voluntary project. A description was given of how the cabin was painted and the new seating area outside was built. After that, the visits grew in frequency again.

  Hearing a car draw up outside, he moved to the window to see Mortensen. The rain’s intensity had increased, and the gutters on the roof were gurgling loudly. Line was walking up from her house with an umbrella in her hand and broke into a run for the last few metres. Wisting went downstairs to let them in.

  When they sat down at the kitchen table, Mortensen placed his laptop in front of him.

  ‘Line and I came up with something yesterday,’ Wisting said, setting down a cup of coffee for his colleague.

  ‘What’s that?’

  Wisting sat down. ‘It kept me awake,’ he said, laying his iPad down on the table. ‘I searched for an old case and found this.’

  He played an archive recording from Dagsrevyen, the TV news programme, from 29 May 2003. The footage showed crime scene technicians working on the ground underneath the tail of a Swissair plane. The reporter recounted how the robbery had been effected with military precision and that the perpetrators had escaped with a substantial sum of money in foreign currency. All trace of them ended at a gate in the perimeter fence at the northern end of the runway.

  ‘The amount of cash is in line with the dates on the banknotes and the exchange rate at that time,’ Wisting explained. ‘The case files will arrive by courier some time today.’

  Mortensen leaned back in his chair and spent a few minutes mulling this over. ‘The theories in this case spread out in every direction,’ he said. ‘This could well be a promising lead, but it’s totally illogical. What would a Norwegian MP have to do with a currency heist?’

  ‘It could fit with something Edel Holt told me,’ Line said. ‘During all the years she worked for Clausen, she noted just three occasions when something bothered him so much it impacted his day-to-day life. One was when his wife died and another was when his son was killed. She couldn’t remember the specifics of the third, only that it occurred between the first two events. That would be around the same time as this robbery and Simon Meier’s disappearance.’

  Wisting drew his iPad towards him. ‘The news report was broadcast that evening, the same day that Simon Meier was seen for the last time,’ he said, explaining how he had thought of using Line to obtain information on the missing-person case.

  ‘I’ve arranged to meet Adrian Stiller at his office at noon today,’ Line said.

  ‘What did he say?’ Wisting asked.

  ‘He seemed sceptical, but I think it’s more a case of him believing there wasn’t much to be done with the investigation. He didn’t come across as very optimistic.’

  A gust of wind hurled a deluge of rain at the window. Mortensen drank his coffee before carefully putting down his cup. ‘They rang from the fingerprint section while I was on my way over,’ he said, his gaze fixed on the list of new messages on his phone. ‘They’ve identified two of the fingerprints on the boxes of cash, but it really just makes the case even more confusing.’

  Wisting drew his chair closer to the table. ‘Who are we talking about?’ he asked.

  ‘They’re from the same person,’ Mortensen replied. ‘Someone called Finn Petter Jahrmann.’

  The name meant nothing to Wisting.

  ‘He has two convictions for sexual abuse of under-age boys,’ Mortensen went on, turning his computer screen towards them. A photo from the records showed a skinny man in his mid-thirties.

  ‘Not exactly the type of guy to commit a robbery,’ Line commented.

  Sliding the screen towards him, Wisting saw that his first conviction had been in 2005 and the second in 2013.

  ‘He’s behind bars in Skien,’ Mortensen said.

  ‘Where does he come from?’ Line asked.

  Mortensen pulled up the personal details from the records. ‘Kolbotn,’ he answered. ‘The same place as Bernhard Clausen.’

  ‘OK,’ Wisting said. ‘I’ll go to the prison to speak to him.’ He got to his feet, something he usually did to mark the end of the morning meeting at the police station.

  16

  Before she got in her car to drive to Oslo, Line had read everything she had found on Simon Meier in the archives. His story was quickly told. He was a quiet lad who mainly kept himself to himself. After high school he had started work in a hardware store and moved into a bedsit. He liked to go fishing. His father claimed in an interview that he had inherited that from him. A family photograph showed the thin, lanky boy holding a large northern pike in his hands.

  The Cold Cases Group’s remit was to go through old, unsolved cases to see if there was
any potential for modern technology to open up new avenues of inquiry.

  Adrian Stiller, with rolled-up shirtsleeves, greeted her with a broad smile. ‘No tape recorder this time?’ he commented.

  When she had worked on the podcast about the Krogh kidnapping, she had recorded almost everything she had done. ‘Not yet,’ she said.

  Since then, she had been in touch with Stiller only once, to try to persuade him to be interviewed about his work, but he had adamantly refused.

  They took the lift up to the sixth floor, where Stiller escorted her along the corridor and into a small meeting room. A bulging pile of documents, enclosed in a pale-green case folder and held in place with an elastic band, lay in the centre of the table.

  ‘The Gjersjø case,’ he said, gesturing with his hand for her to take a seat.

  Line pulled out a chair. ‘Do you have any particular reason for re-examining this case?’ she asked as she sat down.

  ‘It’s still unsolved,’ Stiller responded with a smile, sitting down beside her. ‘That’s a good enough reason for us.’

  ‘I was wondering if you’d received any new tip-offs or if any fresh information has come to light to make the case of interest to your team?’

  Stiller hesitated slightly before answering that it was a matter of sheer routine. It was just long enough for Line to suspect he was holding something back. ‘Any cases where a body isn’t found will sooner or later end up being recalled by us,’ he added. ‘Now it’s Simon Meier’s turn.’

  ‘What are you doing with it?’

  ‘There are two stages,’ Stiller explained. ‘We run through the technical details to see if there’s any material we can analyse using new, improved technology, then we go through the tactical aspects to see if we can pick up on any mistakes or omissions made by the police at the time.’

  Line glanced down at the pile of documents. ‘Have you found anything?’

  ‘The most serious mistake was calling it the Gjersjø case.’