Dregs (2011)

by Jorn Lier Horst

  Edgar Bisjord had reported that he had finished work at the scene of the traffic accident at Vestfossen at 03.45 hours. The investigators had worked on the theory that he had been murdered between 04.00 and 04.15. Everyone who had given a statement to the police had been in bed asleep at that time.

  Rune Hauge had gone to bed early, as the next day was Monday and he had an early rise. He had just started his apprenticeship at the quarry out at Tveidalen. It appeared that his mother was staying overnight at a friend’s house in Larvik, as she had done fairly often after the summer. His brother was out with the car, and Rune Hauge hadn’t noticed whether he had come home during the night. It was not unusual for him to come home late. He did not have a job, apart from helping his grandfather renovate the house.

  The best alibi was the one given by Daniel Meyer who commuted to Oslo where he lived in workmen’s barracks all week, employed by a contractor who was building a large office block at Helsfyr. He got a lift from a work colleague who called for him at his home at 05.30. Theoretically speaking, they could have met Ken Ronny at some place or other along the road, but Daniel had fallen asleep in the car. The driver didn’t know the car, and although there had been little traffic, he could not remember any yellow Ascona.

  Wisting gazed at the dark horizon, thinking that it never ended anywhere. Beyond the horizon there was always a new one, no matter how far you travelled. The thought filled him with a sense of helplessness as he returned to the papers.

  He didn’t find anything more that was worth noting, but discovered one more detail. He had thought that Ken Ronny Hauge had been arrested at home at the house in Strandbakken, but an address in Tanumveien had been entered on the arrest report form. He had been arrested at his grandfather’s house, where the psychiatric patient Hanne Richter had lived until she disappeared nine months previously.

  Christian Hauge’s name did not appear on the list of witnesses. Perhaps he had refrained from making a statement in a case involving his own grandson, or the leader of the investigation had considered it unnecessary. After all, the case had been regarded as solved within twenty-four hours. No one had looked for other possible explanations for what had happened. Ken Ronny Hauge had kept his silence and had not pointed the investigators in any other direction.

  He leaned his head back, gazing up at the stars. The moon was almost full. He tried to fix his eyes on its uneven surface, but his eyes were drawn back down to the documents on his lap.

  Flicking backwards and forwards through the pages he drank what was left in the beer can, then stacked the papers in a neat pile, deciding that he had had enough. He glanced at the clock, wondering whether he should try to phone Suzanne one last time. When he saw that it was past midnight he decided to let things be.

  The cat that had been lying lazily in the chair beside him looked up at a sound from inside the house.

  He heard it again. He got up and went inside. There it was again. It sounded as if someone was knocking on the front door.

  As far as he knew, there was nothing wrong with the doorbell. He unlocked and opened the door slowly.

  It was Suzanne.

  ‘Hello,’ she whispered. ‘I wasn’t sure if you’d gone to bed, so I didn’t want to ring the bell.’

  He let her in, glancing out at the yard behind her. A bicycle was leaning against the garage wall.

  ‘Where have you been?’ he asked.

  ‘On a cycle trip,’ she explained with a laugh. He realised that she had been drinking. ‘A girlfriend and I, but we didn’t get very far. We’ve been sitting at her house all evening. I’m actually on my way home, but I don’t think I’ll manage to cycle all the way into town. I’d prefer to stay overnight with you.’

  He closed the door and pulled her tenderly, carefully, towards him, stroking her in the slightly awkward way he had. She responded by putting her arms around him, letting her head rest on his shoulder and he saw his face in the hall mirror. It looked as if the days gone by since they last saw each other had aged him. New wrinkles were engraved around his eyes and mouth. Silver grey stubble lay like frost on his chin. Then he closed his eyes, pushing her tentatively away and kissing her on the forehead before opening them once more.

  ‘You know what?’ he asked. ‘I was just thinking about you.’

  ‘Good thoughts?’

  He replied by tracing his finger along her face before bending forward and kissing her lovingly.

  ‘Shall we have a drink out on the verandah?’ he suggested.

  ‘You look tired,’ she said, drawing her hand across his forehead. ‘We might as well just go to bed.’

  Wisting looked again in the mirror. She was right - his eyes were ringed with red, and his face was pale and drawn.

  He had to admit that he felt exhausted. However, Suzanne’s nut-brown eyes sparkled when she smiled, as she did now, awakening something in him, brushing away all thoughts of the investigation. She watched his hands as he undressed her. Trembling fingers that unfastened buttons and ribbons until her short dress was open and fell from her body. He took her by the hand and led her up to the bedroom.

  Line raised herself out of bed and placed her bare feet on the floor. For the first time she had not been completely in the present when she was making love with Tommy. Other thoughts had filled her head, and she had lain awake after he had fallen asleep by her side.

  She sat watching him in the half-light. The room was warm and he had kicked the covers off. His body seemed even browner against the white sheets.

  She stood up, walking naked through the flat into the kitchen. The moonlight cast a blue, almost ghostly shadow on the buildings outside.

  She covered her breasts with her hands when two men emerged from a side street. They didn’t look in her direction, but she put on one of Tommy’s T-shirts that was hanging over a chair. It reached to her thighs, and the fabric still retained his light, masculine scent.

  She sat in front of the computer and turned it on, unsure of what she was actually doing.

  The picture of Ken Ronny Hauge filled the screen. He was ten years older than her, and although handsome to look at, it was not any physical thing that attracted her. Something else brought her thoughts continually back to their meeting. A kind of amazement, but she had not quite grasped what it was until now. Could he be innocent? Had he taken the punishment for something he hadn’t done?

  She began to read the newspaper articles that had been scanned in, although she knew the contents as well as the back of her hand. The evidence against him was as solid as a rock. The policeman who had been killed had noted the car registration number on a notepad that was found in his car, and gunpowder residue had been found on Ken Ronny Hauge’s hands. What the police had not been able to find was a motive. Why had Ken Ronny Hauge killed the policeman?

  She turned the problem on its head and asked herself why a possibly innocent Ken Ronny Hauge had said nothing. She could actually find only one answer, that the truth was even worse for him.

  She took a couple of deep breaths, and was on the brink of phoning her father. He was a good sparring partner when it came to finding new, unusual angles and ideas about deadlocked cases. But she restrained herself. It was the middle of the night, and she hoped that he was sleeping.

  At random she searched on gunpowder residue in the text archive, but found nothing of any help. She switched off the computer and crept back to the bedroom, took off Tommy’s used T-shirt and lay down under the duvet. She snuggled close to him and breathed in the smell of him that she liked so much. Then she sat up abruptly, staring at him and over at the T-shirt she had thrown over the back of a chair.

  ‘What is it?’ he mumbled.

  ‘Nothing,’ she answered, but it wasn’t true. She had seen a possibility. That Ken Ronny Hauge had gunpowder residue on his hands showed nothing other than that he had handled a gun. He did not need to be the one who had fired it. He could have taken it from the person who had used it. From the person he was protecting.

&n
bsp; CHAPTER 43

  It was now Monday 28th June. Wisting felt fully rested for once. Suzanne was still in bed when he left for work. It was the first time she had slept in his bed. He couldn’t quite put into words what he felt. In a way it felt good, but at the same time it seemed treacherous. He had allowed her to sleep on his side so that he himself slept on the side that had been Ingrid’s.

  The morning meeting lasted longer than he had hoped. Everyone wanted to express an opinion about how the investigation had developed in the course of the weekend. He let them all have a chance, but kept his thoughts concerning the police murder to himself. He did not entirely trust his intuition, and he still could not see how it actually linked with the current case.

  It was almost ten o’clock when they finished the review and chairs scraped on the floor as they all got up. Wisting sat gathering the papers that were spread across the table in front of him.

  Audun Vetti was in no hurry.

  ‘Do you think we’ll succeed?’ he asked.

  Wisting looked at him. There was something nervous about the smile following the question, and a touch of anxiety in his eyes.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Wisting enquired.

  ‘Will we manage to solve the case?’

  ‘That’s something I can’t answer at the moment.’ Wisting placed his hand on the pile of papers. ‘But it’s a case that we can’t allow to go down in history as unsolved.’

  The Assistant Chief of Police agreed: ‘That wouldn’t be a good idea.’

  Wisting understood that Audun Vetti’s concern stemmed from the thought that the applications for the post of Deputy Chief Constable would soon come up for consideration. It would look bad if he was responsible for prosecuting a case that was apparently in the doldrums and without a solution in sight.

  Wisting shared his concern, but his own disquiet was for different reasons. The role of the police in society was to create a sense of security by combatting crime. The impression created by the police’s energy and determination in an investigation such as this influenced the confidence the public had in the police force. It was the kind of confidence that took a long time to build, but that could be broken down in an instant. Belief in police work was a load-bearing beam in society and perhaps the most important requirement for people’s feeling of safety. They could not risk losing that.

  It did not happen often, but when really serious cases affected a small community, the same sense of unease sprang up. People began to scowl at one another in the shops, doors were locked painstakingly in the evenings, and children were accompanied on their way to school. Wisting had experienced it several times before and really felt the weight of responsibility. It was their task to reestablish this balance, and so the case must be solved.

  Suddenly the noise of hurried activity arose in the corridor outside, someone shouting, the sound of doors slamming and scurrying footsteps. Wisting was getting up from his chair as Espen Mortensen popped his head round the door.

  ‘A corpse has been found out at Stolpestad,’ he said. ‘Are you coming?’

  ‘A corpse?’ Wisting asked.

  ‘In the sea. It’s obviously been there a long time.’

  Wisting took his jacket from the back of the chair and nodded to show that he was ready.

  Stolpestad was situated on the western side of the Naver fjord, and had given its name to one of the many family-friendly camping sites that ringed the shallow bay.

  They drove through the campsite and down to the shore. Teams of police guards had arrived before them. Two patrol cars were on the grassy plain by the water, and an official was positioned at the entrance to the coast road. He pointed out the direction for them and held back some teenagers who wanted to join them.

  A marked path led them through a dense alder grove and over windswept hillocks along the edge of the sea for some distance to the south. Finally they reached a shallow inlet with red and white police tape stretched out.

  The first journalists and photographers were already there. Wisting had some questions thrown at his back when he bent underneath the barrier, but did not answer.

  Down at the water’s edge, a green tarpaulin had been laid over the slippery sloping rock. Sea pinks clung tightly to crevices, heads bobbing in the breeze. A few black birds were circling in the warm air above them, their wing feathers spread like outstretched fingers.

  The man who had found the corpse was sitting on a stone, having given a statement to the first police patrol to arrive. He lived in one of the cottages facing the sun above the discovery site. All the newspaper reports about feet washing ashore and the search for more body parts had made him turn his binoculars down in the direction of the pebbles every day. The body had not been difficult to see, lying face-down, swaying in the water.

  He had taken a boat hook and gone down, extended it across the water to let the hook sink down on the bundle. Firmly hooked, he had dragged the body towards him onto land. Before fetching a tarpaulin to cover the corpse he had phoned the police.

  Espen Mortensen got some help from one of the policemen to fold the tarpaulin to one side. Wisting looked for the feet on the dead body, and saw that the left was missing.

  On the other foot there was a white leisure shoe with an orange area on each side with the curved Nike logo. Two days before, a matching shoe had floated ashore near Solplassen.

  Mortensen took a few photographs before pulling on gloves and protective clothing. Then he hunkered down and turned the body over.

  Hair and parts of the skin had fallen off in large flakes. Parts of the lower jaw were missing and the eye sockets were empty. However, although the face was decomposing, Wisting recognised the features. They had found Sverre Lund.

  He stepped closer to the corpse of the retired head teacher and crouched down.

  He wondered what the missing eyes might have seen. What had raced through his head when he understood what was going to happen? When the truth, ruthless and irrevocable, dawned on him.

  He stood up again. The sun was beating down and water lapped around the pebbles. The birds above them were circling lower, flapping their wings to rise higher before descending slowly, like enormous black shadows.

  CHAPTER 44

  They gathered round the conference table with the curtains drawn. The ceiling projector illuminated the screen with a close-up of the back of the head of a man who had been missing for almost ten months. The hair and skin had fallen off together to expose a gaping, jagged hole in the skull with fractures spreading out in all directions. Small sea creatures had eaten their way through the open wound and left a void. Sticky, brown seawater had run out, solidifying at the bottom edge of the injury.

  ‘Shot in the back of the head,’ Espen Mortensen confirmed. ‘The bullet has taken parts of the jaw with it on exit. This is officially a murder enquiry.’

  ‘The discovery of the corpse is out in all the news media,’ Audun Vetti explained. ‘We need to hold a press conference in the course of the day and confirm that this is a murder.’

  Wisting nodded. The discovery of four human feet in total had caused big enough headlines in themselves but, now the first corpse had been found, the whole business would blow up. The man who found the corpse had already given interviews to several newspapers. The gist of the coverage in the internet newspapers was much the same: a corpse with a missing foot had been discovered.

  ‘You’ll have to make an appearance,’ Vetti continued, fixing his eyes on Wisting.

  ‘I’ve got a lot of other …’

  ‘I’ll convene it for three o’clock,’ the Assistant Chief of Police swept aside Wisting’s objections. ‘That gives us a few hours. Can we confirm the identity by then?’

  ‘We have alerted his wife,’ Mortensen explained, ‘but we need a definite identification before we can release a name.’

  ‘When can we have that?’

  ‘Tomorrow at the earliest.’

  There was a short discussion. Wisting concluded it by suggesting that
they could say that the police were working from the theory that the corpse was the retired head teacher Sverre Lund, who had been reported missing on the 8th September the previous year. There would be no point in keeping this working hypothesis secret from the media.

  ‘Then you’ll turn up at three o’clock?’ Vetti demanded.

  Wisting nodded. He knew why the Assistant Chief of Police was so eager to share the podium. When there was positive information to be announced to the press, he wanted to be on his own, giving it out in the first person singular. When it concerned an investigation that was not producing results, he wanted to give an account of the police work in the first person plural and have Wisting by his side to refer critical questions to.

  ‘Shall we call off the underwater search?’ the Chief Superintendent asked. ‘There probably isn’t any reason to believe that we’ll find anything now?’

  Wisting knew that budgetary considerations lay behind the suggestion.

  ‘Let’s continue it for the rest of the day,’ he proposed. ‘We’re still looking for four bodies.’

  ‘I’ve spoken to Ebbe Slettaker,’ interjected Torunn Borg, referring to the oceanographer. ‘He explained that the discovery of the corpse fits with his calculations of drift trajectories. He’s firmly convinced by the theory that the bodies were dumped at sea, and that they have broken loose somehow.’

  The Chief Superintendent authorised the further search with a nod.

  ‘This is not what we had expected,’ Torunn Borg remarked. ‘We thought we were going to find more body parts. That there might be a natural explanation, such as that it was the length of time in the water that caused the corpses to decompose and body parts to detach, but the rest of this body is still intact.’

  ‘I don’t think this has a natural explanation,’ Mortensen commented.