Dregs (2011)

by Jorn Lier Horst

  ‘What kind of conditions?’

  ‘I need to have a guarantee of no prosecution before I can tell you anything.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  P.A. Haugen leaned his head on the back of the chair.

  ‘This is to do with money,’ he said. ‘If I tell you what I know, I must have assurances that you can’t use what I have said against me.’

  Wisting shook his head.

  ‘I can’t give such a promise, but in general terms I can say that most of the illegal ways by which you may have acquired the money will now be covered by the statute of limitations. It seems the money has been out of circulation for almost two decades.’

  The man took another drink from his glass before dropping his hand and resting it on his stomach.

  ‘I hear what you say. I just don’t want my name mixed up in anything. The newspapers are trying to outdo one another in this business, and I’ve no desire to become a part of it.’

  ‘This is not something that we’ve any intention of serving to the press,’ Wisting assured him, ‘but you know just as well as we do that the press will write whatever they want to.’

  ‘Okay,’ P.A. Haugen said abruptly, slamming his glass down on the desk. ‘May as fuckin’ well. This has been a mystery to me for nearly twenty years. I’ve got over the financial loss and would have been willing to pay it twice over to get to know who was behind it.’

  He got up, went over to the wall unit and brought out a thick, hardback ring binder.

  The rain was pelting against the large windows, sounding like restless fingers drumming on a tabletop. The enormous fruit trees outside were swaying in the wind. The branches were whipping against each other, the leaves turning inside out in the gusts.

  P.A. Haugen laid the binder on the desk and leafed through to one of the last pages. Wisting got up and approached to have a look.

  It was a yellowed newspaper cutting from Verdens Gang. The date in the right-hand corner stated that it was from Thursday 24th September 1991. The headlines were in two layers:

  MILLION KRONER PROCEEDS FROM BANK SAFETY DEPOSIT BOX HAUL

  There was something timely about the printed words. It was almost as though he felt it physically. A pressure disappeared from behind his forehead. These were the pieces they needed to bring forth the whole picture.

  During the weekend and the night before Monday 23rd September 1991, thieves had broken in to the premises of Den Norske Bank at Bryn in Oslo through scaffolding and a window at the back. They had drilled through the floor and down to the vault in the basement, lowered themselves down a hole 40 centimetres wide and cracked open 658 safety deposit boxes. No one was sure how much money they had got away with. The newspapers speculated that it might have been as much as ten million kroner.

  ‘I had just over two million in that vault,’ P.A. Haugen explained. ‘The only thing I can imagine is that you’ve come across the proceeds of that robbery with my fingerprints on them.’

  The big man went round the desk and sat down again, resting his forearms on the tabletop.

  ‘The case was never cleared up,’ he went on. ‘It was professionally carried out with military precision. In and out, without leaving a trace.’

  Wisting leafed through the pages and found a couple of clippings in which the case was followed through subsequent days. A few witnesses had seen two men wearing boiler suits on the scaffolding, but had not reacted to it. All traces of the culprits stopped at the hole in the ceiling. The drill that had been used had been stolen from a building site in the vicinity. When the perpetrators had been satisfied with their haul, they had pulled down a fire hose and turned on the tap. By the time the break-in was discovered on the Monday morning the bank was full of water that had run down the drilled hole and washed away all traces.

  In one of the articles, an Assistant Chief of Police had used the same words that P.A. Haugen had quoted to illustrate how difficult the task of investigating was. At the same time, there was little sympathy available for the many people who had found their safety deposit boxes emptied. One article described how the culprits had left family heirlooms and other valuable items of sentimental value to their owners untouched, while huge sums of money that had been kept hidden from the tax authorities had been taken. Speculation about who was behind the crime was directed towards established, criminal circles in the capital city. Simultaneously, journalists portrayed the unknown culprits in a way that was reminiscent of the glorification in history of the old master robbers Ole Hoiland and Gjest Baardsen.

  Wisting closed the binder and sat down. He was in agreement with P.A. Haugen. The money that the old men had exchanged came from the safety deposit box haul.

  The net of connections was becoming entangled. The safety deposit box robbery had taken place the same night that Ken Ronny Hauge shot and killed a policeman at Eikeren. That was his motive for choosing to shoot his way out and later keep silent about everything that had to do with the case. Ken Ronny Hauge was one of the men behind the bank raid. The E18 was the quickest route out of the capital, but the main road through the countryside was a natural choice to make if you wanted to avoid the busiest traffic. Chance events caused it to go wrong, and the young policeman was murdered so that another crime was kept hidden.

  It was such a logical chain of events that he wondered why none of the investigators in the two cases had seen the potential connection before. They had probably been reported side by side in the newspapers, but without the information Wisting now possessed there had been no apparent correlation. Without something to link them, there was very little to suggest that these two serious crimes might be connected. They took place miles from each other. The investigators in the bank robbery were looking for a professional gang, and the police murder appeared to be an isolated action by a young, confused man who had never been arrested previously.

  P.A. Haugen interrupted Wisting’s train of thought: ‘Who was it?’ he asked. ‘Who was it who emptied the safety deposit boxes?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ Wisting replied, getting up from his seat. ‘But I think we’re close to finding the answer.’

  ‘When can I have it back?’

  ‘Do you mean the money?’

  The other man nodded.

  ‘I don’t think you should count on getting it back.’

  ‘What do you mean? It’s my money, isn’t it, with my fingerprints on it.’

  ‘You were the one who didn’t want your name mixed up in anything,’ Hammer reminded him.

  ‘But that’s something different.’ P.A. Hauge frowned. ‘What are you planning to do with it? Take it yourselves?’

  Wisting gazed at the big man for a long time in silence before quietly explaining that they were only talking about a small sum of money that they had, as a matter of fact, come across.

  ‘We’ll have to come back to a possible distribution when the case is solved,’ he concluded, mainly so that the other man would drop the subject.

  P.A. Haugen gestured with his hand as though to signify that the money meant nothing to him.

  ‘Did you find anything other than money?’ he asked.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  The man at the desk exposed a gold tooth at the back of his mouth when he grinned.

  ‘I had some pictures lying in that safety deposit box too,’ he laughingly responded. ‘Of a private nature, if you understand what I mean.’

  ‘I understand,’ Wisting replied, shaking his head. ‘We haven’t come across anything like that.’

  P.A. Haugen got up and walked round the desk to accompany them out.

  ‘I’m almost more interested in getting the pictures back than the money,’ he said, walking ahead of them to the doorway with rolling movements.

  ‘You’ll be hearing from us,’ Wisting rounded off the discussion, thanking him for his assistance without offering a handshake.

  Outside, the wind had become stronger, whipping the rain against his face. Wisting lowered his head be
tween his shoulders, pulling his jacket tightly round him. For the first time in this investigation, he felt that he could see the outlines of a solution.

  CHAPTER 56

  Neither of them spoke for the first two minutes back in the car as curtains of rain drummed on the roof and blurred the windscreen.

  ‘The police murder,’ Nils Hammer said abruptly, ‘took place at the same time as the bank safety deposit box robbery.’

  Wisting nodded and repeated the theory he had reasoned out during the meeting with P.A. Haugen.

  ‘I’ve read up on the old case,’ he rounded off, explaining how he had requisitioned the documents dealing with the police murder. ‘I think that Ken Ronny Hauge is covering up more than that other crime.’

  ‘That one or those ones that he’s taken part in,’ Hammer added.

  Wisting nodded again, becoming thoughtful. In its character and execution, the bank raid resembled the crimes that the five-man group had carried out during the post-war period, punishable offences that might be morally defensible. The culprits had helped themselves to money that was probably the proceeds of other punishable activity, leaving behind valuable jewellery and personal possessions.

  ‘Military precision,’ Hammer remarked, as though reading Wisting’s thoughts. ‘That’s what it said in the newspaper cuttings. The raid was carried out with military precision. How old were Torkel Lauritzen and the others in 1991?’

  ‘About 60 years old,’ Wisting answered. ‘Lauritzen was still working as the personnel manager at Treschow-Fritzoe.’

  ‘And Otto Saga was still head of the Air Force officer training school in Stavern,’ Hammer went on, gripping the steering wheel more tightly. ‘It wasn’t closed down until 2002. And Sverre Lund was still the head teacher at Stavern school. They were all still working.’

  Wisting bit his bottom lip. The chaos of possibilities that had opened up made him feel faint. He suddenly felt unbearably tired and exhausted, and realised that he had forgotten to phone the doctor that day as well.

  ‘How much did it say that the haul from the safety deposit box robbery was?’ Hammer continued. ‘Up to ten million? That fits well with the money that the old men exchanged. It’s their share of the haul!’

  ‘The five-man group was shut down in 1990,’ Wisting reminded him, rubbing his eyes. ‘And although they were in good physical condition, I can’t quite see it. Grandfathers working together, with one of their grandchildren, on what would be described as the coup of the times.’

  They remained sitting for a while, throwing theories back and forth, without any result other than the conviction that they were close to something significant. They still didn’t quite manage to grasp what was in the knowledge they possessed.

  Wisting leaned his head against the window again. The sound of the wheels on the wet asphalt made him sleepy, but the feeling that there were small, significant details still overlooked prevented him from dropping off.

  The police station was empty when they arrived. It was almost nine o’clock and most of the investigators had done more work than he could impose on them. He himself had been awake since Torkel Lauritzen’s body had been found beneath Bondebrygga quay at Nalum eighteen hours before.

  He made a quick visit to his office to look through his messages, without finding anything of interest, before going home.

  It had stopped raining. The water was lying in puddles on the uneven surface of the yard in front of his house in Herman Wildenveysgate. Dry branches had broken off the tall birch tree beside the driveway and were strewn across the stone slabs.

  Heavy clouds darkened the summer evening. He let himself in and switched on the light and the radio to break the silence. Then he suddenly felt hungry. There were still a few cartons of yogurt in the refrigerator. He ate one at the kitchen worktop, then helped himself to another and brought it with him into the living room. The bundle of documents dealing with the police murder was lying on the coffee table. Without quite knowing what he was looking for, he sat down and began to leaf through them.

  It didn’t take him long to find it.

  In the hunt for possible accomplices, the social circle round Ken Ronny Hauge had been interviewed and had to account for their movements on the night the murder took place. The person who was regarded as having the best alibi was Daniel Meyer. Wisting remembered reading that before. Daniel Meyer was a weekly commuter and lived in workers’ accommodation in Oslo. A colleague picked him up from his home at 05.30 on the morning of Monday 23rd September, and they had driven together to the city.

  The interesting thing was where in Oslo Daniel Meyer was living and working. At interview it had been logged that he worked for a contractor who was building a large office block on the site of the old match factory at Helsfyr. Wisting could envisage the red brick buildings in the east end where underpaid factory workers had laboured under life-threatening conditions. At the beginning of the 90s, that had been Daniel Meyer’s place of work. Almost wall to wall with the bank that had been the scene of one of the most spectacular robberies of the time. Through long working days Daniel Meyer had been able to study how customers had come and gone, what the work routines were, and how the bank was constructed.

  Wisting swallowed as something fell into place, a sense of how the police murder and the safety deposit box raid were connected.

  He turned the pages to find Daniel Meyer’s colleague who had given him a lift. He confirmed the alibi but had nothing to mention, apart from Daniel Meyer being, as usual, very tired. He dozed in the car all the way to the capital city.

  The distance from the scene of the murder at Eikeren to his home in Stavern was not more than a hundred kilometers. Even though the roads then were worse than now, it was possible to drive it in an hour and a quarter. The policeman had been killed between 04.00 and 04.15. It would have been possible for Daniel Meyer to get back to Stavern in time to be picked up by his work colleague. It could have been part of an already planned alibi for the bank raid.

  Wisting hugged the papers he was holding to his chest and laid his head back in the chair.

  They were getting there, was the last thought he managed before he fell asleep.

  CHAPTER 57

  It was still raining when Wisting awoke. At some time during the night he had moved from the chair in which he had fallen asleep to the settee.

  The roof of his mouth and his lips were dry after sleeping with his mouth open. He licked his lips, grunted and sat up. The clock showed that he should have been at the office half an hour earlier. He had slept for almost ten hours, but did not feel rested.

  He thought about lying down again, but remained seated, trying to collect the thoughts he had fallen asleep with. They seemed even more vague than on the previous evening, but nevertheless he managed to assemble them so that they emerged in a logical way. It was Ken Ronny Hauge and Daniel Meyer who had committed the bank robbery almost twenty years previously. Probably Daniel Meyer had planned it, inspired by his grandfather’s tales of heroic exploits during the post-war period. The opportunity must have presented itself as he became familiar with the bank’s routines and saw how he could enter from his work on the scaffolding at the building site.

  However, although Wisting now had an understanding of the factual circumstances surrounding the police murder, he had difficulty comprehending its direct connection to the case he was now investigating.

  His starting point had to be that the money the three old men had exchanged was part of the proceeds of the robbery. It had lain hidden somewhere or other until the passage of time meant that it had to be exchanged if the entire booty was not to be lost. The fifty-kroner notes had already become too old and were simply dumped in the sea, together with the murder weapon. What he did not understand was why the old men had to pay with their lives. And what parts were played by the mentally ill woman Hanna Richter and the carer Camilla Thaulow? As though these questions were not enough there was also the fact that the feet of the murder victims had been chopp
ed off. What could the meaning of that be?

  He sighed heavily before gathering up the papers from the police murder into a bundle and going through to the kitchen. He took the last yogurt carton from the fridge and decided to phone Line in the course of the day to see how she was getting on. He went through to the bathroom, undressed and had a shower. The water heated up quickly. He closed his eyes and leaned back into the jets of water. They still didn’t have anything tangible, he decided. They still needed to find proof.

  After his shower he made a plan for his working day, put on clean clothes and left in his car. Instead of driving directly to the police station, he swung off the road at Agnes and drove down to Daniel Meyer’s house by the sea.

  The pretext for talking to him was the same as the last time he had driven down the gravel path. He wanted to ask about the pistol that his grandfather had entrusted to him. It would be the start of a conversation that might move the investigation forward.

  There were no other cars in the yard in front of the house. Perhaps Daniel Meyer had put his own car into the garage, or else he was not at home again.

  Wisting parked, got out and slammed the car door behind him. He scrutinised the windows as he walked to the door, but there was nothing to indicate that anyone had heard him arrive.

  The pennant on the flagpole was flapping in the wind. A seagull took off from a rocky outcrop and struggled upwards with its wings against the wind. The doorbell did not produce any response.

  Wisting went round the house and peeped in through the verandah window. On the inside, everything seemed untouched since his last visit. Books and notes lay across the coffee table in the same way. The single wall light shone on the wall behind the settee. That meant that Daniel Meyer had not been home for twenty-four hours.

  Cold rain was driving obliquely in from the iron-grey sky. Wisting pushed his hands deep into his trouser pockets, strode across the small patch of lawn behind the house and up onto the sloping rock that divided the property from the sea. The waves below him churned up murky sand and gravel on the beach. He stood watching the waters before straightening up against the wind and taking out his phone. He called the operator and asked to be connected to Daniel Meyer’s mobile phone. He went back to the front of the house while the phone was ringing and tried the door handle. Locked. The phone rang out, and no one answered. He turned and went up to the post box that was situated on the driveway. He picked up two newspapers and glanced at them - today’s and yesterday’s editions, and the local. The case he was working on dominated the headlines. The day before, the money trail was the most important news, while today the headlines read Two new corpses discovered. Those were the body at Bondebrygga quay the night before and the other that had been found at Rovika. The photograph was credited to the landscape photographer who had reported the discovery.