Dregs (2011)

by Jorn Lier Horst

  The newspapers were getting wet in the rain, and he replaced them in the post box. Then he went down to the rear of the house again and up onto the verandah. He tried the door. It was locked too, but he pulled on it a couple of times and felt how ramshackle it actually was.

  It was an old-fashioned lift and push door that was locked at the frame with a simple hook-type latch. Weather and wind had caused movement in the woodwork, and an attempt had been made to fill the gap between the door and the frame with a rubber strip.

  Wisting looked about and caught sight of a barbecue utensil hanging on a hook beside the gas barbecue. He took the fish slice, pressed it under the door and lifted it up. It was easier than he had thought. With a little jerk he jacked the hooked latch up and out of its keeper, and then the door was open.

  ‘Hello?’ he shouted into the house as he took his first step inside.

  He received no answer.

  ‘Hello,’ he repeated, calling out that he was from the police before going from room to room, just to confirm that they were empty.

  He stood facing the coffee table that Daniel Meyer used as a home office. In the main, there were copies from various reference works and printouts of old newspaper articles that had been stored on microfilm. Working notes looked as though they were connected to his book project. It appeared, however, that the work had been pushed aside. Several articles about the case he was investigating were lying in the middle of the table. On top were printouts of internet reports about the money trail and how the missing men from the five-man group had exchanged large sums of cash. Wisting leafed through the collection of articles and also found an account of the old fifty-kroner notes that the boys at Lydhusstranda beach had found. Right at the bottom were much older newspaper cuttings on which the paper was yellowed and the date 1st July 1999 was noted in ballpoint pen.

  Washhouse burned to the ground was the headline. The photograph that illustrated the piece had been given a larger space than the actual text. It showed the black, burned out shell and a chimneystack that were left after the intense blaze, and a couple of firemen coiling up hoses. Wisting skimmed through the text. It had to do with an abandoned, small farmstead out at Brunlanes. He had to look back and forth between the description of the place and the picture before he understood that it concerned the place where Ken Ronny Hauge had gone to live after being released from prison. Now he recognised the ruins from the fire in the picture as well. Parts of the chimney were still there by the sea.

  Wisting put the cutting back into place with the others. He did not know what it might mean, but Daniel Meyer must obviously have seen it in connection with the new clippings.

  He looked around and discovered that he had left wet footprints on the floor. He didn’t quite know what he had expected to find, but for one moment imagined that Daniel Meyer was lying dead in one of the rooms.

  He thought about whether he should look for the pistol since he was in the house, but decided instead to leave. He had no legal grounds for going in. The man who lived here might be suspected of having participated in the murder of a policeman almost twenty years previously, but the case had not yet expired under the statute of limitations. He had no right to ransack his house.

  He went out the way he had entered. The sliding door was more difficult to lock than to work open, but he managed. Wet prints on the parquet were all that gave away the fact that someone had been inside, and they would soon dry up and disappear.

  CHAPTER 58

  The corridor in the investigations department was strangely empty. Wisting went down the corridor with its open doors and vacant offices. Computers had been left without anyone having logged out, and at several of the desks there were half-empty coffee cups, as though the investigators had abandoned their posts in a hurry. Not even the girls in the criminal proceedings office were sitting in their usual places.

  Further down the corridor he heard excited voices coming from Espen Mortensen’s crime technician room.

  Silence descended when Wisting entered. Everyone turned to look at him, before turning their eyes again to the computer screen that was broadcasting pictures from the bottom of the sea outside Tvistein lighthouse.

  A woman was standing on one leg, her arms to the side and her head inclined backwards as she moved her body slowly and rhythmically. The picture on the screen reminded Wisting of a ballet performance.

  The woman was Camilla Thalow. Her body rocked backwards and forwards in the light from the powerful lamps of the mini submarine. She was dressed as described in the police bulletin that had gone out a week before: long dark trousers, a white blouse that was swaying in the water, and a pair of white training shoes.

  Round the ankle of one leg there was fastened a steel wire that stretched down to the grey sea floor. At the other end, it was tied to something that resembled the axle of a car that functioned as a weight.

  The mini submarine manouevred in a circle round the dead woman. Little fishes were frightened and rushed off, but came back again right away to nibble small pieces of flesh from her face and wherever the skin was bare.

  The camera zoomed to the wire around the one leg, and Wisting could see how it chafed and cut into the skin.

  He realised that this was how the other bodies had been placed at the bottom of the sea, but the underwater currents had pulled and torn at them, and in time the foot had been separated from the rest of the body.

  The severed feet were not part of a lethal plan, but the result of something that had gone wrong for the murderer.

  The explanation appeared so simple that he had to wonder why he had not seen this solution earlier.

  The office staff and those who were not participants in the investigation left the room. Wisting stepped closer to the screen. The aspect that had been most bewildering and puzzling in the case was now explained. There was a logical explanation for why and how a total of four severed feet had washed ashore. That part of the mystery was solved. It was no longer something he needed to brood over.

  ‘Congratulations,’ Hammer said, pushing a portion of snuff under his lip. ‘It’s the needle in the famous haystack. I really didn’t believe we were going to find anything.’

  ‘We did find the pistol,’ Torunn Borg protested.

  Hammer shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘I don’t know if two needles are easier to find than one.’

  ‘The leader of the search says that they have seen a lot of other scrap iron too,’ Mortensen explained. ‘Chains, wire and other objects that are lying on the bottom and could be used for the same purpose.’

  ‘Could it give us anything?’ Wisting asked, pointing at the wheel axle on the computer screen.

  ‘Perhaps,’ Mortensen replied. ‘We can certainly find out what type of car and what model we are talking about, but more than that I don’t think we should hope for.’

  One of the ladies from the criminal proceedings office was back.

  ‘There’s a psychiatrist phoning and asking for you,’ she said. ‘He called yesterday as well. Can you take the call, or shall I ask him to phone back?’

  ‘A psychiatrist?’

  ‘I think his name is Terkelsen. He’s phoning from Furubakken.’

  Wisting recogised the name. It was Hanne Richter’s psychiatrist.

  ‘It’s to do with the case,’ the office lady added with a nod at the screen.

  ‘I’ll take it in my office,’ Wisting answered, walking quickly back.

  He sat down at the desk, feeling out of sorts. His head ached and his muscles and joints were sore. He noticed how his body was rallying. He was sweating and freezing at the same time. It felt like the start of a cold, but he was afraid that it might be something more, that the listlessness he had felt these last weeks might take a turn for the worse. He lifted the telephone, closed his eyes and announced himself.

  The man at the other end began by referring to Wisting’s visit to his surgery at the psychiatric clinic five days previously. His speech was long-winded, s
low and with a mournful tone.

  ‘One hears all the time that one shouldn’t hesitate to make contact with the police, although you yourself may not think that the information you have is particularly relevant.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘That the police may nevertheless be able to use the information, and that, in conjunction with other information, it may be valuable.’

  Wisting leaned back in his chair, remaining silent while the psychiatrist came to the point.

  ‘Well,’ the other man continued. ‘I have of course been following the case in the newspapers and on the television. It can’t be avoided, and recently there has been a great deal of discussion of these banknotes. I don’t know if it has anything to do with the case, but there was one thing that emerged from my discussions with Hanne Richter that might be of interest.’

  ‘What was that?’

  ‘I had put it down to paranoia at the time, but in light of everything that has come out since we spoke last, I’m no longer so sure. It doesn’t need to have been a delusion.’

  ‘What did she tell you?’

  ‘She talked about there being money inside the walls of her house.’

  ‘Money inside the walls?’

  ‘In the walls of the living room.’

  Wisting’s grip tightened on the receiver. He saw with his mind’s eye how the wooden lining along the living room wall in Hanne Richter’s house was broken up and spread all over the floor.’

  ‘Can you elaborate?’ he invited.

  ‘Not really,’ the other man responded. ‘I noted it in a sentence during my last conversation with her.’

  ‘How had she found it?’ Wisting enquired. ‘What had she done with it?’

  ‘As I said, I assumed it to be a sign of worsening psychosis, and didn’t attach further importance to it. As I remember the discussion, she had a notion that the money was placed at her house by the same mafia organisation that abducted her and put a radio transmitter in her body. It was a new aspect of the conspiracy against her.’

  Wisting asked a few more questions, but eventually had to give up. When he ended the call, he nevertheless felt that what she had said about the money was not a part of the madness that ravaged her. Seen in connection with everything that Wisting now knew, it seemed sensible. The money that Hanne Richter had talked about must be the proceeds of the bank robbery. It had lain hidden behind the wooden panelling in the house that actually belonged to Christian Hauge. That was where Ken Ronny Hauge had been arrested on Monday 23rd September 1991. What was it he had read in the old investigation documents? That Ken Ronny Hauge had no permanent employment, but was helping his grandfather to renovate the house?

  The investigators who arrested him had looked for the murder weapon, but never found it. Obviously, it had lain hidden behind the wall, along with the money, until someone took it out again last autumn and started off a deadly series of events.

  He felt they were getting closer. During the first week, the questions had simply been swarming, making the case more complicated every day that went by. Now the answers were coming.

  He got up abruptly and gathered the other investigators for a quick meeting. He shared his thoughts and theories with the others. Halfway through the presentation they started to nod their heads, but they continued listening without interrupting.

  ‘Ken Ronny Hauge,’ Torunn Borg said aloud, almost to herself. ‘Of all the names that have been mentioned and the people who’ve been referred to in this case, he has to be the one who’s most capable of murdering five people.’ She got up and approached the little worktop to fill a glass of water. ‘All the same, it’s not enough. We only have circumstantial evidence. We have nothing to prove that he has killed any of them. We have nothing to link him to any of the murder victims.’

  ‘The three old men were friends of his grandfather.’

  ‘Yes, but we need more than that to make an arrest. We need to prove that, in some way or another, there was contact between them a short time before they disappeared.’

  ‘The money is a connection,’ Espen Mortensen pointed out. ‘If it’s right that the money has been hidden behind the living room wall at Hanne Richter’s house we should be able to find Ken Ronny Hauge’s fingerprints there.’

  Torunn Borg shook her head and walked over to the window.

  ‘I don’t rightly know how we can build that up into evidence,’ she said, drinking from her glass. ‘The only thing we have is third-hand information from a crazy woman’s psychiatrist. In addition, it was probably Ken Ronny Hauge who built the wall. His fingerprints would be no more than another piece of circumstantial evidence. If we had actually found his fingerprints on any of the old banknotes it would have been a different matter.’

  ‘Okay,’ Wisting said. ‘What we need is a definite connection between Ken Ronny Hauge and one or more of the victims. How can we find that?’

  ‘Perhaps the answer will come from there,’ Torunn Borg said, pointing outside with her glass of water to the police station entrance.

  The others looked at her but, when she didn’t explain further, they got up and went over to the window. A bent old man was being helped out of a taxi. His hair was thick and grey and he was wearing a grey overcoat with a belted waist. He supported himself with a stick as he walked to the entrance.

  ‘Who is it?’ Wisting enquired.

  ‘Advocate Storeggen,’ Torunn Borg explained. ‘He has Parkinson’s disease and lives out at the nursing home. When I went round conducting interviews with the residents he had as little to contribute as the others, but he also said that he had client information that he would have to consider whether he could divulge.’

  Wisting’s eyes followed the man. Despite his gait being affected by his illness, he appeared purposeful and determined.

  CHAPTER 59

  Wisting received the retired lawyer down in the reception area and went up in the lift with him to his office. The man slackened his belt when he sat down in the visitor’s chair, but kept his overcoat on. His fingers trembled, fumbling with the buttons. His hands were wrinkled and covered in liver spots, with blue-black veins beneath the skin. His breathing was laboured.

  Wisting stood looking at him while he settled in the chair. Underneath his coat, he was wearing a dark suit with white shirt and tie. He was newly shaven, but the bloated skin of his face had made the task difficult. He had probably had help from one of the carers, but nevertheless he had several little nicks on his chin and throat.

  The lawyer must have been approaching ninety. He had been an independent and self-reliant person all his life, but old age had most likely made him dependent on help for the most everyday things.

  ‘Coffee?’ Wisting offered.

  ‘Yes, please,’ the old man nodded. ‘I’d like that.’

  Wisting had to go through to the conference room to find a couple of clean cups and a pot that was not empty. When he returned, he noticed how the slightly nauseating smell of an old person had filled the room.

  ‘One of your staff was out at the nursing home on Sunday,’ Storeggen began as Wisting poured. ‘She asked about things that had to do with Otto Saga and Torkel Lauritzen. And about Christian Hauge.’

  Wisting filled his own cup and sat down.

  ‘I don’t know if it means anything to you,’ the lawyer continued, ‘but you can best decide that for yourself.’

  ‘What do you know?’ Wisting enquired.

  The man at the other side of the table cleared his throat.

  ‘Christian Hauge came to me a year ago, wanting help to write a will, or at least discuss the possibilities for one.’

  ‘Who was to benefit?’

  ‘It was of course the grandchildren, Rune Eiolf and Ken Ronny. I assume you know the story. Christian Hauge’s daughter drowned herself because of her despair and shame after Ken Ronny murdered a policeman at Eikeren. But there was also another heir. An unknown descendant.’

  Alf Storeggen bent forward with difficulty a
nd took hold of his coffee cup. His hand shook as he lifted it, and he chose to put it down again.

  ‘Who was that?’ Wisting asked.

  ‘Kristin Saga. She’s married to Torkel Lauritzen’s son and is called Lauritzen as well now.’

  Wisting sat back in his chair. Yet another piece falling into place. The missing DNA match. They had compared the DNA profile from the severed feet with the profiles from the surviving relatives, but had not found that any of them matched Otto Saga. This was the explanation.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked nevertheless.

  ‘Christian Hauge was sure at least. He told me about the group of friends and their close relationship, and how it had become a bit too close.’

  ‘Did Otto Saga or any of the others know about it?’

  The old man shook his head.

  ‘I don’t know, but I doubt it very much indeed.’

  Wisting closed his eyes for a moment. He tried to collect his thoughts. All of the murders could be regarded as a chain reaction that started after Christian Hauge died. He could not see, all the same, how what he had just learned could take the murder investigation forward, with the exception of solving the identification question.