‘The war was a good time for those who knew how to profit from it,’ he went on, putting his pipe back. ‘Share prices rose and unemployment went down to almost zero. Prices for goods were very good. Actually it was quite logical, since almost half a million Germans came here and needed to be supplied with most things. Many people became extremely well off through co-operation with the Germans. It was an especially good time for the construction industries that helped the Germans build aerodromes, barracks and railways, or that produced different materials with the help of Russian and Serbian prisoners of war.’
Carsten Meyer took a deep breath, closed his eyes and lowered his head as though he was already tired of the story.
‘Many Norwegian war profiteers went free after the Second World War,’ he went on. ‘Financial compensation from traitors was based on class inequality. At the same time as wanting to punish companies and individuals that had made good money from the war, the wheels of commerce had to been kept oiled. The country had to be rebuilt, and there was little point in punishing the big companies that employed a large number of people. Many of the biggest profiteers went free.’
‘But you made sure of fairness all the same?’
‘We carried out some equalising actions, as I said, that ensured that we were self-financing.’
‘What was that about?’
Carsten Meyer blew a puff of smoke from the side of his mouth that rose in a blue ring towards the ceiling.
‘We liberated money that had been hidden away and preserved.’
‘How did you do that?’
‘We made visits at night to industrialists, contractors, barracks barons and other profiteers. You will perhaps call it burglary and theft but it had to do with confiscating funds from people who had gained financially from the presence of the Germans.’
‘Were there no police investigations?’
The old man shook his head.
‘We’re talking about hidden wealth and black market money. The people whose profits we took risked being investigated as traitors if it became known what had happened to them.’
Wisting sat back with a sceptical expression on his face. What Carsten Meyer was describing was plain theft. The five-man group had been in reality a band of thieves, but Meyer was making them sound like heroes. In a sense they were talking about the perfect crime. Thefts that would never be investigated. Breaking the law in a way that was almost morally justified.
‘How much money are we talking about here?’ he asked.
‘In one place we took out over three hundred thousand kroner from a safe. That’s more than five million in today’s money. The man we visited ran a cement company in Telemark and was the only person in the area with a cement ship. He had three of them in fact, and had transported all the material for the bunkers along the coast between Oslo and Kristiansand.’
‘What did you use the money for?’
‘We built training centres abroad. In England and America. In addition, we set up cash reserves so that we had funds available in case of an invasion. None of us made any kind of personal gain.’
‘Is there any money left from these cash reserves today?’
Carsten Meyer shook his head.
‘I understand what you’re driving at. I heard about the money on the news, but we carried out the last action in the summer of 1949. The group was dissolved in 1990. The money was gone long before then. What remained of liquid assets was returned to the Ministry of Defence.’
‘Does that apply to your weapons also?’
Carsten Meyer’s pipe had gone out while he was talking. Nevertheless, he raised it to his mouth, sucking slowly until his cheeks became hollow.
‘Not the personal ones,’ he replied, bringing his pipe down to his chest. ‘No one asked about those.’
Wisting pulled a printout from his inside pocket with the picture of the pistol that had been found in the depths of the sea. He unfolded and laid it on top of the half-finished crossword puzzle.
The old man put the pipe back on the dish and lifted the sheet of paper. Wisting explained how they had found the weapon.
‘Do you think Sverre was shot with it?’
‘We don’t know, but we’re having a problem tracing it.’
‘It might be Sverre’s own gun.’ Carsten Meyer raised his head to look at him. Something unfamiliar had come into his eyes, something glowering and stubborn. ‘We were all equipped with weapons like that, but you’ll probably never be able to trace them.’
‘Why not?’
‘It’s what they call a lunchbox Colt, made here in Konsberg during the war.’ He pointed at the picture. ‘It’s completely lacking in serial number or any other identification marks. During the war, the employees at the weapons factory smuggled out pistols for use in resistance activities in their lunchboxes.’
Wisting leaned forward.
‘Do you have such a weapon?’
Carsten Meyer gripped his pipe, knocking it on the side of the dish before refilling with painstaking movements. He glanced out of the window where the first dark clouds had appeared above the mountains.
‘Daniel has taken charge of it,’ he replied after a pause. ‘He’s interested in everything that has to do with the war.’
CHAPTER 49
Dark clouds had gathered on the horizon by the time Wisting arrived in town. The air was closer, warm and heavy.
He met two boys and, he presumed, their fathers as he went into the police station. They appeared almost disheartened and excited at the same time, and it was difficult to tell what their complaint was. Perhaps one of them had a bicycle or a mobile phone stolen. Everyday events took place, in a sense, in parallel with the investigation. Other duties did not disappear - they simply piled up.
The other investigators had eaten and left their empty pizza boxes in the conference room. He found a corner slice to chew down.
Torunn Borg passed the open door, popping her head inside when she saw him.
‘There’s something you need to look at,’ she said. ‘Come on!’
Wisting followed her along the corridor and into her office. She had laid out grey paper from a roll on the floor, in the way they usually did when they received objects that must not be contaminated prior to being examined in detail by a crime technician.
Four carrier bags and a black plastic bag were lying on the underlay. One of the bags was marked with FM-kjeden, a grocery chain that had merged with other stores and disappeared as a trademark.
The contents of one of the bags had been taken out and lay in a little heap. It was money. Old fifty-kroner banknotes.
‘Where do they come from?’
‘From the sea,’ Torunn Borg explained. ‘Two boys came here with them. They had drifted onto land in a black bin-bag out by Lydhusstranda beach.’
Wisting helped himself to a pair of plastic gloves from a box on the office desk and squatted down to study the find. He was aware of the smell of salt seawater, and many of the banknotes were wrinkled and seemed stiff after they had lain in the water and then dried out again.
Most of the notes were from the 1980s with a picture of Aasmund Olavsson Vinje. He pulled on the gloves and took out a bundle from one of the other bags. These were even older. On the right of the portrait of Bjornstjerne Bjornson he found various dates from the 1970s. Several of the notes had been printed as far back as 1966. There were also some notes of a different design and more than fifty years old. There had to be about a million kroner altogether. Money that had become completely worthless.
‘Where’s Hammer?’ Wisting asked, getting up.
‘He’s still in Oslo. He’s got the banknotes from the collector and taken them to Kripos. He thought we would get the first reports from the fingerprint section as early as tomorrow afternoon.’
Wisting pulled off the gloves and related the story of his trip to Kongsberg.
‘I think we might be getting close to something,’ he said, nodding in the direction of the banknotes. ‘This
is what it’s about. Money. They’d become invalid and were dumped in the sea together with the murder weapon and the dead bodies.’
‘Could Carsten Meyer have played an active role in this drama?’ Torunn Borg wondered. ‘The money must have some connection to the five-man group and he’s the only survivor.’
‘Carsten Meyer is an old man with a walking stick,’ Wisting said, thinking back to his meeting with him. ‘He seems uneasy about something but I think it’s more likely that he’s afraid he is the next on the list.’
‘By the way, we’ve got the weapon ashore. Mortensen has it in his office. Carsten Meyer is correct. It’s an unregistered Colt put together from weapon parts that the employees in the Kongsberg factory smuggled out in their lunchboxes during the war. Apparently there are something like five hundred of them.’
‘It’s the grandson who has taken over Carsten Meyer’s gun,’ Wisting explained. ‘We need to contact him and find out if he still has it.’
Torunn Borg noted it down as a task that she would take care of.
‘The same applies to the other descendants,’ Wisting continued, going over to the door. ‘All the members of the five-man group were equipped with the same type of weapon. We must locate those pistols. Who still has them?’
There were not many of the investigators left in the police station. Wisting sent the rest home and sat down behind his office desk. The reminder note with the message about phoning the doctor was still lying in the middle of his desk. He took a piece of tape and fastened it in the middle of his computer screen before picking out two of the expensive tablets he had bought in the health-food shop. He swallowed them dry and decided to phone early the next morning. The doctor had his mobile number and would have phoned him if it were anything serious. Moreover, he did not feel quite so exhausted now. He was still tired and out of sorts, but did not feel just as feeble.
The clock above the doorway showed almost nine o’clock, so it was still not too late to visit Suzanne. He would just make one phone call before he finished.
Turning on the computer he searched for the phone number of Svenn Tollefsen, moving the message from the doctor’s surgery to the side of the screen.
Wisting had first met Tollefsen on December 8th 1980. On the same day, John Lennon was shot and killed by a mentally disturbed fan in New York. It was also the day a deranged man had decided to raid the town’s branch of Norges Bank with a bulldozer.
Svenn Tollefsen had been sitting in the counting house when the whole building began to shake. Wisting had been in the first patrol car to arrive on the scene. By then the bulldozer had become stuck and the driver had given up and run off. Wisting caught up with him a couple of blocks away and an arrest had taken place via the doctor on duty at the closed psychiatric ward. Later, Svenn Tollefsen had stopped counting money and become responsible for security at the bank. It was natural for them to keep in touch.
Svenn Tollefsen commented that it had been a long time since they had contact, before asking what he could do for the police.
‘Tell me what you know about fifty-kroner notes,’ Wisting requested.
‘Well, printed on cotton paper with gravure printing. The watermark consists of a row of portraits, the same as in the main picture. That would be Asbjornsen, as in Asbjornsen and Moe of the folktales. The serial number is printed with ultraviolet fluorescence, and there are various microscopic letters in it, among them a hidden N in the rosette on the front. It was upgraded in 2003 with a broad security thread. Almost nobody forges it. There’s more to be made from forging the larger notes. To date, over 100 million of them have been printed. The circulation period is becoming steadily shorter. It’s not unlikely that they’ll soon be replaced by a 50-kroner coin, or simply be done away with.’
Wisting leafed through his notes from the interview with the adviser from the savings bank in Oslo.
‘When was it introduced?’ he asked.
‘The first ones were printed in 1996. Prior to that, we had the nynorsk banknote.’
‘Nynorsk?’
‘Yes, with the portrait of Aasmund Olavsson Vinje. He was of course the champion of nynorsk, the New Norwegian language, and on that one it was called Noregs Bank, instead of Norges Bank.’
‘And that’s not valid any longer?’
‘No, it went out of production twelve years ago. The first were printed in 1984. Now it’s completely out of circulation. After January last year you weren’t able to exchange it either, but it can have a high value to collectors.’
‘What about the banknotes that are even older?’
‘When Camilla Collett was replaced by Kirsten Flagstad on the hundred-kroner note in the middle nineties, it was decided that old notes would continue to be legal tender for one year after being discontinued, and after that you could exchange them in a bank for a further ten years. In order to clear the situation up, it was also decreed that all old notes could be exchanged in banks up until July 1999.’
‘So all old notes had a value up until that time?’
‘That’s right.’ Tollefsen cleared his throat at the other end. ‘Is this about the money that the two boys found?’
‘Have you heard?’
‘It’s on the internet. There’s speculation about whether it has something to do with the missing men.’
Wisting clicked on to the web pages of Verdens Gang newspaper. The discovery of the money was one of the top news items, illustrated by a picture of two boys sitting behind a camping table covered in fifty-kroner notes. He recognised them as the two boys he had bumped into in reception a short time earlier. They had gone to the newspaper before the police. It was probably the only way they could turn the discovery into hard currency.
‘Do you think there’s a connection?’ Tollefsen asked.
‘I don’t know what to think,’ Wisting responded. He had the information he wanted, and rounded off the conversation with some questions about family and some remarks about the weather.
The sheet of paper in front of him was now filled with dates. He took it with him and let himself into Torunn Borg’s office. The money was still piled up on the floor.
He switched on the ceiling light and put on a new pair of gloves to go systematically through the banknotes with the portrait of Aasmund Olavsson Vinje. Some copies of the first edition from 1984 looked in good condition. The bags they had been in must have been tied up well so that water had been kept out. A collector would certainly buy them.
He had jotted down that the old fifty-kroner note had been printed between 1984 and 1996. However, there were no banknotes in the pile that had been printed after 1991. The conclusion was simple: the money must have been kept hidden since that time.
Wisting became thoughtful as he looked out the window. The clouds had come closer and were darker. The sea was churning, and the little boats were heading for shore.
In 1991, Ken Ronny Hauge had shot and killed a policeman with a Colt, or hadn’t he? The components of the case were starting to come together, he thought. However, he still could not see in what direction they were pointing. One thing was certain. Something was about to break the surface.
CHAPTER 50
‘I like that sound,’ said Line.
‘Mm hmm,’ Tommy replied at her side. She could tell by his tone that what he wanted most was to go to sleep.
The rain was drumming steadily and rhythmically on the roof tiles. She stood up and went through to the living room where raindrops were meandering across the windowpane, chased by playful gusts of wind. Down in the street, puddles and little streams gathered and overflowed into one another.
From the living room window she could see the black sea. Flashes of lightning ripped through the night sky out there in the distance, but she didn’t hear any thunder. The storm was still a long way off.
She peeped in at Tommy, listening to his heavy breathing. Then she went out to the kitchen and sat at the computer. Ken Ronny Hauge had taken up all her time in the past few days, although
she had finished writing up the interview. The possibility that he was innocent had become an obsessive thought. Her deadline was approaching, and she still had three more interviews to do. The first of these was the only woman on the list. Her name was Beate Olsen, who had served fifteen years for killing her uncle. On the evidence of the newspaper reports she emerged as a sly and greedy woman. The actual murder concerned money. Her grandfather owned a company that galvanised metals for use in the shipping industry. Beate was employed in the accounts department, and she had a good understanding of how the business was declining, although the same business had made her grandfather a multi-millionaire. At the time of the murder he was on his deathbed, and there were only two heirs to the fortune: Beate Olsen and her uncle.
The uncle remained a bachelor until he met a woman during a holiday to the Philippines. They planned to marry, but the wedding was postponed when the grandfather’s condition worsened and he was admitted to hospital. While he lay on his deathbed, Beate Olsen poisoned her uncle with the aid of potassium cyanide that she had obtained from the galvanising works and mixed into a bowl of sugar. The poison had paralysed his respiratory system and destroyed his lung tissue.
The death had looked like a cardiac arrest, and the case would probably not have been investigated as anything different if internal stocktaking on the same day had not revealed irregularities in the chemical accounts. Several grammes of the deadly powder were missing from the storeroom. A thorough check of the access system showed that Beate Olsen had let herself into the department the previous night. It was a chemist who put two and two together and requested a meeting with the police.
Her stay in prison had turned Beate Olsen into a Christian. She had met Jesus in a cell at Bredtvedt women’s prison. Now she was running her own small religious community in Vennesla. Her spell behind bars had enriched her life, and hers was a story that contrasted with the other murderers Line had met.
Her interview subjects had a variety of motives for turning to murder. It was not something she had consciously set up, but it would make more interesting reading. After Beate Olsen she was to interview a gang leader who had served time for a revenge killing in the Pakistani community in Oslo.
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