Dregs (2011)

by Jorn Lier Horst

  Three days later Otto Saga went missing from Stavern nursing home. A retired wing commander he had previously been head of the Air Force officer training school in Stavern. After his wife died he started to write poetry and had issued a couple of collections through a local publishing company. Three years previously his family had started to notice the first frightening signs of dementia. Repeated minor infarctions or haemorrages in the brain injured nerve cells, leading eventually to the impairment of his mental faculties so that he forgot things and repeated himself. The family had successfully applied for a place in an institution, and their experience was that the staff not only achieved good relations with the old man but also communicated with him better than they did themselves.

  He disappeared after breakfast on Thursday 4th September. The staff searched throughout the buildings, eventually widening the search to the area of the old shipyards and the abandoned military barracks where he used to work, and the residential district of Agnes where he had lived. He had got lost before and not been able to find his way back. When the evening shift came on duty he had still not been found. The police were alerted and the search continued all night: in parks and private gardens, unlocked storerooms and outhouses, town centre streets and boat harbours. After twenty-four hours there were no more places to look and the search was called off. 79-year-old Otto Saga seemed to have been swallowed by the earth.

  Sverre Lund was an old schoolteacher who had ended his professional career as the head teacher of Stavern primary school. He was reported missing by his wife, Greta Lund, on Monday 8th September at 17.32 hours, according to the documentation. After explaining to her that he had a few errands to run he had walked off from his home at around eleven o’clock. His errands usually comprised of a cup of coffee, a Danish pastry and an Oslo newspaper at Baker Nalum’s and, never far from home, he was usually back by one o’clock.

  Both of the women behind the counter at the bakery shop knew Mr. Lund well, but neither of them had seen him that day. A chambermaid at the Wassilioff Hotel, who had been in the backyard having a cigarette, around twelve o’clock, thought she had seen the former head teacher getting into the passenger seat of a grey estate car outside the old post office. The driver had never contacted the police. All traces ended there and Sverre Lund was never seen again.

  Hanne Richter was 34 years old, and had no connections to the others. Her case was different. A nursery teacher, she had been on sick leave for a long time before she vanished. For parts of that time she had been an in-patient at Furubakken, a regional psychiatric institution in Larvik. She was diagnosed with a paranoid schizophrenic psychosis, and had delusions that a foreign intelligence organisation was watching her and carrying out secret searches at her home, among other reasons to plant spying equipment. Anti-psychotic medicines suppressed her symptoms and allowed her to live independently in her rented house. When the community nurse visited on Wednesday 10th September, she was missing. The nurse had let herself in and searched through the house, noticing that the mail and newspapers from Friday 6th September had been taken in, but that the ones for the subsequent days filled the post box. She had expected to find Hanne Richter dead, either in her bed or in the bath, but couldn’t find her anywhere, neither in the house nor in the surrounding area. The police published the name and picture of the missing person in the media, but it produced no results. No one had seen Hanne Richter or knew what had become of her.

  Work on the four missing persons had taken up a large part of the police station’s resources during the following weeks without leading to any explanation, and then they had had the case of the Night Man to deal with. Someone had decapitated a young girl and displayed the severed head on a stake in the middle of the town square, all their resources had been transferred and by Easter the four missing persons cases were deposited in the archives.

  Wisting had taken them out again an hour ago.

  CHAPTER 3

  Wisting closed the office door and sat on the chair behind the desk. He pushed away the piles of paper that were waiting to be dealt with, and put the files concerning the three missing persons in the middle of the desktop with an involuntary sigh.

  In recent years his workload had grown while, at the same time, resources had decreased. Cases were left lying or only superficially investigated before they were shelved, to the despair of both the investigators and the victims. It did not have to be like this, if they only had the time that was required. If only they had more staff.

  Truthfully, the time was approaching when crime would begin to pay. Criminality in the country was growing more strongly than ever, and he saw no sign of effective countermeasures. On the contrary, police and courts of law continued to be disempowered. The forces of law and order were in the process of capitulating.

  He took a blank sheet from the bundle on the shelf by the window and again listed the names of the missing men in slightly clumsy handwriting. He sat back to study the short list:

  Torkel Lauritzen

  Otto Saga

  Sverre Lund

  Behind each name lay the hidden concern of their relatives. Worry, despair and sorrow. A void. A puzzle - and a solution.

  The disappearance cases had already been investigated. The family and acquaintances of the three men had been questioned and their last movements checked up until the day they vanished. The cases had dragged on without result. They had not been Wisting’s responsibility, but he had watched from the sidelines before having to contend with the Night Man. After that he had been instructed to take a few weeks’ holiday and, when he returned, the case files had been put away. Now he had to catch up with reading the extensive investigation material.

  He was reorganising the folders, trying to take an overview of the three cases, when there was a knock at the office door. ‘Come in!’ he shouted.

  Espen Mortensen stuck his curly head into the room. ‘I’m off,’ he said.

  Wisting raised his eyebrows.

  ‘To forensics,’ continued the crime technician. ‘I’m running tests on the reference samples from the family members, so that we can identify the feet.’

  Wisting nodded approvingly. He had not managed to gather his thoughts properly yet, but of course it was important to have confirmation that the severed feet belonged to two of the missing persons. ‘How have you done it?’ he asked.

  Mortensen took a few steps into the room. ‘Of course, we’ve got Sverre Lund’s DNA profile,’ he explained.

  Wisting pulled the top folder across the desk towards him and leafed through to a duplicate copy of the yellow ante mortem form. The old head teacher’s wife had handed in his toothbrush, so his DNA profile was secured for the future and stored in the register of missing persons. It had not been as simple with the missing people from the care home. By the time the investigators realised that the cases were not going to have a quick resolution their rooms had already been emptied to make way for new patients. The files contained the usual information about height, weight, eye colour, length of hair and so on, together with details about the state of their teeth and their general health, but no DNA profile. None of this information would be sufficient to identify a severed foot.

  ‘It went quite well, really,’ Mortensen elaborated. ‘Otto Saga’s daughter is married to Torkel Lauritzen’s son. I went to their home an hour ago, explained the situation and took saliva samples from both.’ He paused on his way out of the room. ‘In a couple of days we should know who the feet belong to.’

  Wisting gazed after him. Coincidental snags in an investigation, such as that two of the missing people were related, could lead to something. Perhaps it had nothing to do with the case, but it was a kind of unevenness that created a type of routine suspicion.

  He let his gaze wander in the direction of the window. The office faced westwards, and the sun hung high above the horizon on the sea. Small boats with hoisted sails were crossing the fjord. He fetched himself a cup of coffee before once more settling and starting on the mass of
material.

  To begin with, he found it difficult to concentrate. He ought to phone Suzanne, but postponed doing so. It would be too much of an effort to discuss his doctor’s appointment over the phone.

  They had met just over six months previously. He had not thought to establish a new relationship after Ingrid died suddenly almost three years before, but the capricious accidents of life decreed otherwise when an unpleasant case involving two brutal murders brought them together. Without Suzanne it would not have been solved.

  He fiddled involuntarily with his wedding ring, feeling the sense of guilt that always overcame him when thoughts of Suzanne mixed with memories of Ingrid. It came over him like a wave. The coffee in his cup was getting cold. He took a big drink and forced himself to become a policeman again.

  In the course of several hours he went through the cases again, and by that time his body was filled with tiredness. The air in the office was clammy and close and the sweat from his armpits had spread across his shirt.

  His conclusion was that the investigation had been, to put it mildly, somewhat lacking. Several of the staff at the care home with a central role in the men’s lives had not been interviewed at all. Most of the work was superficial. No searching questions had been posed. No trace of conflict among the missing men or the people around them had been discovered. No disagreements. No enemies or hostility. No family secrets had been uncovered.

  The material gathered was like a smooth surface, but Wisting knew that somewhere underneath there was darkness. It was always there, as it was everywhere. It was just a matter of scraping thoroughly.

  There was another knock on the door. Assistant Chief of Police Audun Vetti opened without waiting for an answer. ‘A briefing?’ he demanded, sitting on the visitor’s chair.

  Wisting leaned his forearms on the desktop and looked at the man in charge of prosecution services. Audun Vetti wore a newly pressed uniform with stars and hard edges on the shoulders, a signal that he held final authority. He reminded Wisting of the proud teapot in Hans Christian Andersen’s fairytale. Self-centred and arrogant, it felt more important than the cups and saucers in the rest of the tea service because it had both a handle and a spout.

  Audun Vetti was not the ideal team player. Little inclined to collaborative working or listening to the suggestions of others, he left when difficult decisions had to be made. He had flawed personal insight and was driven by his ambition to climb to the top of the career ladder. At the moment he had an application in for the vacant post of Deputy Chief Constable, and would need a case with a media profile, preferably with a speedy resolution.

  Wisting didn’t quite remember how the story of the teapot ended, but thought that it had something to do with broken shards of crockery. ‘This is what we know,’ he said wearily. ‘Three old men have been missing without trace for nine months. Two, who were related, lived at Stavern nursing home.’ He paused and brought out the envelope with the pictures of the severed feet, spreading them in front of the Assistant Chief of Police before continuing: ‘This week we have found two feet, from two different people.’

  Vetti picked up one of the pictures and peered at it. ‘Do we have a murder case?’

  Wisting looked around as though he were afraid that someone was listening, sighed heavily and said, ‘Between you and me and these four walls, without a shadow of a doubt.’

  CHAPTER 4

  Line let her eye wander round the room once more. The small kitchen was equipped only with the basic essentials: cupboard, worktops, cooker and fridge. Two high windows looked out to the backyard. Pots of basil, oregano and lemon balm were growing on a herb rack on the windowsill, covering half of the window and the most of the view.

  The man on the other side of the table had killed someone fifteen years before, but displayed no signs of guilt or remorse. He leaned backwards in his seat, with a gentle expression round his mouth. Clean-cut, he was well dressed and his hair was carefully groomed. His eyes were thoughtful, and he was breathing steadily. All the same, there was a kind of uneasiness in the room that made her feel uncomfortable, wondering if the whole interview project was a mistake.

  The idea, to have conversations with six murderers, five men and one woman who had served almost 100 years altogether in prison, was a good one. She wanted them to talk about all those years of incarceration, the feeling of how time had run slowly past them. Of how each day had been a lost day, and gave them less time for the rest of their lives.

  The journalistic angle was to show what punishment had done to them and whether they had become better or worse people. It would place a question mark beside how effective the use of prison as punishment actually is. In a time when the growth of criminality demanded more police with expanded powers, and shocking individual crimes were splashed all over the media, it was easy to call for more severe punishments. It was difficult for people who had not sat in prison to understand what it means to be deprived of your freedom year on year. Punishment was understood by society to be a necessary evil; but Line saw a paradox in this, when it also held the view that helping people in difficult situations, easing their pain and lessening their suffering, was fundamentally right.

  Through this project she would question whether severe punishment had a purpose, by showing what happened to people who spent years behind walls. Her hypothesis was that a moderate level of punishment, a milder use of coercion by the state, could contribute to a more humane society.

  The article had to be submitted to the weekend magazine by late summer. She had been allocated eight pages and two weeks to travel and conduct the interviews, and the number of pages could be increased if she produced good pictures. Since she was going to work on the project during her holidays as well, she would have five weeks in total. She had set her sights on having the article on the front page.

  Henning Mork was the first interview subject. The file of research material comprised mainly newspaper reports from the days in May 1994, when he had strangled to death a thirteen-year-old boy, Kristian Storas, who was his neighbour. Several of the articles described him as a child murderer. The case had aroused loathing throughout the country.

  Henning Mork had turned twenty six two days before he committed murder, the same age as Line was now. Today he was forty one years old. At the time he had been newly married, his wife was eight months’ pregnant and he had a new job in a company that produced powder coatings. His whole future was in front of him. In secret though, he had started a relationship with a childhood sweetheart who had moved into the same street. The newspaper cuttings revealed that while Henning Mork’s wife had been at the maternity clinic the murder victim had discovered him and his lover in flagrante in the double bed at the house.

  Line had been nervous in advance, but had not expected their meeting to be quite so distasteful. The piercing quality in his dark eyes, and the way he knit his brows and scrutinised her, scared her, quite simply. She could see that he was dangerous, that deep within him there was something dark and unpredictable.

  This impression was in sharp contrast with his willingness to participate as an interview subject. He kept to the topic and gave supplementary answers. He was open and honest about life behind walls and the road from prison back into society. He talked about his life of isolation, and did not hide how bitter he was. Now she wanted to go deeper, closer to him.

  ‘What are your thoughts about what you did?’ she asked.

  Henning Mork looked at her with his dark eyes, his right hand tightening round the glass in front of him. Line lifted her own glass and drank, as though to take the edge off the question.

  ‘It was a moment’s impulsive action,’ he answered, clearing his throat. ‘It was all over before I could think. For that they took fifteen years of my life.’

  ‘You think the punishment was too severe?’

  He drank slowly, staring at her, before putting down the glass. ‘I should never have been convicted.’

  Line hesitated. ‘What do you mean? You
did commit the murder?’

  ‘I killed him,’ Henning Mork nodded. ‘The judge thought that was wrong of me. I disagree.’

  Line squirmed in the uncomfortable silence that followed. ‘I don’t understand …’ she began. ‘Do you mean that it was right of you …’ Afraid that a direct reminder of what he had done would be provocative she refrained from completing the sentence.

  ‘Whether a murder is right or wrong depends on the consequences for those involved,’ Henning Mork elaborated. ‘If the consequences, taken together, are good, then the murder is morally justifiable. If the consequences, taken together, are bad, then it’s wrong.’

  Line frowned. She didn’t hide the fact that she had difficulty in following his train of thought.

  ‘Think of a situation in which you could save two people by killing one person. Would it be right or wrong to kill?’

  Line admitted to herself that she had not thought about this question thoroughly enough to give an answer. Instead she came back with an objection: ‘But of course that was not the case …’

  ‘What about avoiding great suffering?’ Henning Mork interrupted. ‘Would it not be right to kill one person in order to save many others from long-lasting agony? Wouldn’t the sum total of the consequences justify the murder?’

  Line did not answer.

  ‘Or think about a healthy person being killed so that his organs could save the lives of other people who need a heart, liver, and kidneys in order to survive. It isn’t impossible that such a murder could lead to a better world with several happy lives, rather than a world in which those who need organs have to die instead. Isn’t the killing of the healthy person then morally right?’

  ‘Kristian Storas was thirteen years old,’ Line reminded him, feeling provoked.