CHAPTER 53
At two o’clock, Wisting went into the conference room carrying a half-full cup of coffee and found a place for himself at the end of the table.
The provisional post mortem report was on to top of the bundle of documents he brought with him. The corpse was in an advanced stage of decomposition, and the forensic scientists could not specify a definite cause of death. Although the body was decayed it had been concluded that Torkel Lauritzen showed no external signs of violence. The shape of his skull was normal, with no fissures apparent. The arms and legs were not dislocated and had no obvious fractures or injuries in the joints. The same applied to the spine and pelvis. The lungs were described as collapsed, but intact. The lining of the pleural cavity was not torn. The larynx and hyoid bone were uninjured. No foreign matter in the windpipe. No fractures in the thoracic skeleton. The arterial branches showed evidence of significant hardening, but there were no signs of any obvious, abnormal changes in the chest or abdomen.
Wisting was surprised. He had expected the report to describe an injury that could be linked to the use of a gun, but the forensic examination indicated, on the contrary, that advanced cardiovascular disease could have led to death from natural causes.
They had been sitting in their meeting for a quarter of an hour when the message arrived. Wisting had summarised the circumstances surrounding the discovery during the night and the contents of the post mortem report. He was about to give a briefing on the old fifty-kroner banknotes when the wall telephone rang.
Nils Hammer, who was sitting nearest, took the call, listened, nodded and put down the receiver.
‘They’ve found another one,’ he said. ‘There’s a corpse lying out at Rovika.’
This time Wisting stayed behind. He sent Espen Mortensen and Nils Hammer to the discovery site, then gathered his papers and went back to his office.
The Rovik fjord was a small arm of the fjord east of Nalumfjorden. As the crow flies, Rovika bay was less than one kilometer away from Bondebrygga quay where the last corpse had been found. The area out by Tvistein lighthouse that they were searching with the mini submarine was situated barely four nautical miles beyond.
Wisting knew the area well. Difficult to reach in a boat, it was enclosed by steep cliffs on land, and islets and skerries that made the seaward approach challenging.
Three years previously, Wisting had worked on a case involving an abandoned sailing boat found anchored at the innermost point of the narrow bay. A trail of blood on board had started a comprehensive investigation that had taken him and Torunn Borg all the way to Spain before they managed to solve a case that involved the smuggling of wanted war criminals.
He lifted the cup to his mouth and sipped the contents. The coffee had gone cold, and he put it back down.
On his computer screen he could follow the progress of the case from the operations log. The person who had reported the dead body was a local landscape photographer who had gone to the mountains around Rovika to take pictures of the choppy sea and the cloud formations out at the mouth of the fjord. The body had been lying twisted on the pebbles in the bay, and he had phoned the police without climbing down the steep mountainside.
The police boat had arrived at 14.23, he saw from the log. They reported back that it was a female corpse, which had been in the water for quite a while, and that the left foot was missing.
Wisting concentrated on his paperwork while waiting for the log to be updated with new information.
There was one aspect of the case to which he felt he had not devoted enough attention. Incredible though it seemed, they had found four severed left feet. DNA-analysis had confirmed that three of them belonged to Torkel Lauritzen, Sverre Lund and Hanne Richter. Later, the corpses of both Torkel Lauritzen and Sverre Lund had been found, and now probably Hanne Richter also. Otto Saga was still missing, but the fourth foot did not belong to him. It had unknown DNA, and it definitely did not belong to Camilla Thaulow. It had been in the sea for too long.
Wisting looked out the preliminary reports from the time that Otto Saga had been reported missing. He had eaten breakfast at half past eight along with the other residents of the nursing home. Afterwards he was in the habit of sitting down with the newspapers in the common room until lunchtime but, on that day, the newspapers had lain untouched. The staff had let themselves into his flat when he didn’t come for his meal. His outdoor clothing was gone, and one of the staff had the caretaker come with him to search the old dockyards and the disused military camp where the old man had worked, and the residential area where he used to live. Three hours later, they alerted the police.
Otto Saga would have been 80 years of age if he had still been living.
In the interviews the police had conducted with the staff at the nursing home he was described as a sociable man who was obliging and had a particular talent for creating a good ambience around him. In the last few days before he disappeared he had withdrawn a little and become anxious. The carers ascribed that to concern about Torkel Lauritzen who had gone missing a few days earlier. The doctor had considered giving him medication, but decided to wait.
Wisting brought out the picture of the severed foot that had been found at Corntin a week earlier. Little grains of sand were sticking to the shoe. The sole had a brown coating of algae. Seaweed and kelp were entangled in the laces. Wax-like shreds and strings of skin were hanging out of the opening.
They still did not know to whom the foot belonged.
It was logged on the screen that the crime technician had arrived at the discovery site. Two minutes later, Espen Mortensen phoned.
‘It’s Hanne Richter,’ he informed Wisting. ‘Her left foot is missing. The shoe on the other foot is a white Adidas shoe with three black stripes, exactly the same as the left foot that we found.’
‘Can you tell me anything else?’
‘She’s been shot. There’s an entry wound on her forehead.’
Wisting took a deep, slow breath and gazed at the window as he collected his thoughts. Raindrops were running down the glass. Something must have provoked this series of murders; Hanne Richter was the fourth. He could not imagine what had caused the first piece to fall, what lay at the bottom.
‘There’s not a lot more that I can get done out here,’ Mortensen continued. ‘I’ll take a few photographs and get the body packed up and sent to forensics.’
The phone rang again as soon as he put down the receiver. It was an unknown number, and he hesitated about taking the call. Each time the phone rang, he felt that the case just became more complicated.
The man who was phoning introduced himself as Ragnvald Hagen from the fingerprint department at Kripos.
Wisting sat up in his chair, picked up a ballpoint pen and got ready to take notes.
‘It’s about all these banknotes we’ve received,’ the other man explained. He sounded resigned. As though his work duties were routine stuff and bored him.
‘Yes?’ Wisting said.
‘Do you know why they call banknotes circulating assets?’
Wisting did not respond.
‘Well,’ the man from Kripos went on. ‘It’s because that’s just what they do. Circulate. Go from one hand to another. A fingerprint on a banknote usually proves nothing.’
‘Have you found any prints?’ Wisting wanted to know.
‘Of course,’ the other man replied. ‘We’ve taken a selective sample, choosing those banknotes that look as though they’ve been least in circulation.’
‘And?’
‘There might be something here. We’ve found the same prints on 43 notes from three different bundles. A whorl patterned thumbprint with fine detail. I don’t know how much you understand about prints, but this is quite exceptional. I haven’t seen anything like it. It looks as though someone has sat counting the notes before putting them away.’
Wisting swallowed. He felt a sense of eagerness rising, something he had almost forgotten how to feel.
‘Do we know
who it belongs to?’
‘I do at least,’ the fingerprint man answered. ‘Per Arne Haugen, born on the 23rd February 1952. Lives in Baerum. First registered here in 1982.’
‘Porno-Pea?’ Wisting asked.
‘Some people call him that too.’
Wisting raised his hand to his forehead and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. As he had feared, it just became more complicated.
P.A. Haugen, often known as Porno-Pea, was a businessman whose business was pornography. He operated retail sales, magazine publishing and mail order in Norway, Sweden and Denmark. In the 1970s he distinguished himself as an advocate for pornography in Norway and his sales outlets in Oslo were continually attacked by feminist activists and anti-pornography campaigners. Trade in what at that time was illegal hard pornography led to several police raids and the seizure of a great deal of material. Haugen had served a number of prison sentences for tax avoidance and failure to submit accounts, and for a period was deprived by court judgement of the right to conduct business in Norway. The last Wisting had heard of him was that he had invested some of his wealth in an internet company registered abroad.
‘I’ll send a provisional report about what we’ve discovered so far,’ the man from the fingerprint department concluded.
Wisting thanked him for the information and put the receiver down carefully before lifting it again to phone Nils Hammer.
CHAPTER 54
Line sat at the kitchen table in Tommy’s flat, listening to the rain rushing through the gutters. Her eyes were fixed on the computer screen, as they had been through the whole night.
Everything had seemed more logical when she eventually went to bed, than now as she went through her notes once more. All the same, she was still sure that it could not have been Ken Ronny Hauge who had murdered the policeman.
Tommy had been grumpy when she got up, the first time she had seen him like that. When she had gone to bed, in the early hours of the morning, she had been looking forward to telling him what she had discovered. Now she couldn’t bring herself to do it. They had quarrelled, and although she actually had to admit that he was right, it was not necessary for her to sit up working half the night and then sleep half the day, she had objected and argued that he had to understand that this was her work. He had slammed the door behind him as he went out. She had watched from the window while he crossed the square in the pouring rain without an umbrella or raincoat. Then she had sat at the computer again.
The company StoneTech AS had been established on the first of September 1991 and entered in the companies register a month later. Rune Eiolf Hauge was listed as managing director. According to a state-of-the-art homepage the company supplied, among other things, automated cutting and grinding machinery for the stone industry, and had patented a laser-based cutting technology. The figures in the accounts were substantial, and Hauge himself was good for almost thirty million.
She had discovered that Rune E. Hauge was a tough businessman. Most of her search results appeared in finance and industry magazines. They portrayed him as an enterprising, intelligent man and a forward-looking and determined business owner. However, behind the headlines about success, there were some other stories.
She found readers’ comments in which employees talked about irregular payment of wages, a lack of consultation, slow wage developments and an absence of important social benefits. He was accused of using unorganised labour and was repeatedly castigated by the trades unions and the labour inspectorate. He emerged increasingly as a cynical employer without respect for the normal rules of working life.
His private life had also been turbulent. He married for the first time in June 1994. She had found a wedding photograph in a photo archive, in which the bridal couple was pictured with their two-year-old son. The marriage lasted four years. Hauge married again two years later, this time to a woman who had been employed in his company since it started. They had two children together. His address history showed that they had lived apart for two different periods, but that they were living together now in a modern, residential area on the east side of the Larvik fjord.
Line got up and walked up and down the kitchen floor a couple of times. The theory she had formulated was built on speculation and supposition. StoneTech had been established at the same time as the police murder at Eikeren. At the same time, Rune E. Hauge was about to start a family. He had been living with the girl who would become his first wife three years later, and who must have been pregnant when they moved in together.
After reading all the material she could find about Rune E. Hauge, she was left with an unfavourable impression - a self-centred, ambitious, arrogant and power-hungry man. They were qualities that contrasted greatly with those of the brother who had been found guilty of murder.
After that September night in 1991, it was Rune E. Hauge who had most to lose from being arrested. He was at the beginning of what would turn out to be a successful fairytale of a business, while his brother was out of work.
She could guess how it all fitted together. Both brothers had been in the car. Which of them had fired the shots, she could not tell, but she had difficulty believing that it had been Ken Ronny. Nevertheless, they had been together on it. Ken Ronny was the one who was brought in. Since there had been no reason to take his brother down with him he sacrificed himself. His silence under questioning and at the trial afterwards had placed a protective veil over his brother, Rune E. Hauge.
Her reasoning seemed sound, but building a case on speculation was like pouring sand into your petrol tank. You could be sure it would break down. She had to find confirmation. She would have to meet Ken Ronny Hauge again. Perhaps she could also find out why the young policeman had been killed.
There was a knock at the front door, and she went through to see who it was. Tommy was standing there, dripping wet, with a pizza carton in his hands. Tendrils of black hair were hanging over his forehead.
‘I rented a film,’ he smiled.
Line smiled back. He passed the box to her and fished a DVD out of his inside pocket. It was a romantic comedy of the type he knew she liked. She managed to give him a kiss on the cheek before he disappeared into the bathroom. She put the pizza down in front of the TV set and went into the kitchen, reluctantly closing the lid on her laptop.
CHAPTER 55
Nils Hammer was driving. Wisting leaned his head against the side window and studied the raindrops as they were forced against the glass as they travelled, running into long streams.
It felt good to get away from the station for a while. It gave a breather and the opportunity for reflection without continual interruptions. His thoughts had been circling obsessively round the five-man group and the reverberations their actions in the past might have caused in the present. Without having shared his thoughts with anyone, he had become convinced that the police murder in 1991 must also have been some kind of ripple effect from past events. Possibly he was affected by a sort of mental tunnel vision and allowing his intuition to rule too much.
The windscreen wipers swept from side to side in rhythmic movements as he concentrated on the major developments. His role as the leader of the investigation was to keep an overview.
They took an hour and twenty minutes to reach Hovik. P.A. Haugen lived in an old Swiss style villa that was situated at a vantage point some distance along a cul de sac, with an unimpeded view over Drobak Sound.
The old businessman was exactly as Wisting had imagined him. Apart from his hair now being completely white, he was just the same as in photographs in newspapers and magazines: medium build, suntanned, the top three buttons of his shirt unfastened. Around his neck hung two heavy gold chains that matched a solid gold wristwatch.
‘Usually I don’t talk to the police without my lawyer present,’ Haugen explained as he ushered them into the large house. High ceilings and double doors between the various rooms made it bright and airy.
‘But I became curious about what little you said on the p
hone,’ he continued. ‘Maybe that was your intention?’
‘We are at least hoping that you’ll be able to help us,’ Wisting replied.
P.A. Haugen threw open the doors leading to an office with red, plump leather furniture and a magnificent oak writing desk. The flooring was made of dark wood, and heavy, burgundy coloured curtains hung at the windows.
‘Can I offer you anything?’ he asked, opening the top of a patinated globe that camouflaged a drinks cabinet. ‘Mineral water, Farris, or something?’
They both accepted with thanks, and then sat down in the deep chairs facing the massive desk.
‘When you phoned, at first I didn’t understand at all,’ Haugen elaborated, handing each of them a glass. ‘But it seems you have found my fingerprints on old banknotes that were confiscated in connection with a murder inquiry?’
Wisting nodded, watching the man as he walked back to the globe and poured some whisky into the bottom of his own glass.
‘I’ve been following the case,’ Haugen went on, sitting down. ‘The newspapers are full of it, of course. Only grotesque murders can compare with sex when it comes to circulation figures.’
He laughed at his own witticism and Wisting put on a smile for the sake of politeness. P.A. Haugen appeared to be accommodating, and Wisting had no intention of destroying that illusion. In reality, he represented something that Wisting despised.
P.A. Haugen drank deeply from his glass.
‘It sounds completely unbelievable, but I think I can provide you with some answers.’
Wisting remained silent, waiting for the man to continue.
‘That said, I don’t think that what I have to tell you will help in your murder investigation,’ he added.
‘What do you know about the matter?’
The big man squinted at them.
‘Before I say anything at all, we need to talk about the conditions,’ he said.
Dregs (2011) Page 23
