He understood her need to feel secure. She had experienced a lot, and assurance was important to her. It was important to him too, but he probably defined it differently. For him it was not so much physical presence. He was used to being on his own. It was everything to do with not having to weigh his words too carefully, secure in the knowledge that the other person would construe everything for the best. With a feeling of closeness, even if the other person was at work, or in another country, as he and Ingrid had achieved.
She had been employed as an aid worker with NORAD and, although he had missed her at times, they never lost that feeling of closeness. With Suzanne it was more difficult when they both worked such long hours. He watched her manoeuvring between the tables, thinking there was something different in her eyes. Something slightly cold and suspicious, maybe even frightened. They had become strangers.
It was visible now, he thought, even though it had been present for a while. A distance had opened between them. At the beginning he had sat up waiting at night, but more often these nights he went to bed before she came home – and was away before she wakened in the morning. He had to come here to spend time with her.
He sat for a while longer, finishing his coffee, before getting to his feet, picking up his jacket and making his exit.
51
The house in Herman Wildenveys gate lay empty and silent. Wisting parked among yellow autumn leaves in the courtyard. When Suzanne had moved in, she had filled the space left by Ingrid. Scared she would erase all traces, he had kept her slightly at a distance but soon realised that he had missed having someone to come home to.
So, perhaps Suzanne had felt like a replacement. He slammed the car door behind him.
Line was not home; which suited, he thought. From his bedroom wardrobe he took a black cap, a pair of leather gloves, a black polo-neck sweater, and dark jeans.
After changing his clothes, he posed in front of the mirror. He was unshaven and red-eyed, but the outfit was right, even if he couldn’t look himself in the eye. The plan had taken shape after his first call from the forensic psychiatrist, prompting the notion that whoever abducted Cecilia had also taken Ellen Robekk.
One of the older detectives had responsibility for the Ellen enquiry, and Wisting had never been given a complete overview. When Cecilia vanished the following year, Frank Robekk took it on himself to go through it all again. He would have been thorough and painstaking, but now Wisting needed to check it all himself, and that meant he had to get into the historical archives at the station without a key or admittance card.
Letting himself out, he pressed himself against the hedge bordering his neighbour’s garden, where there was a trampoline in the centre of the extensive lawn. A tricycle lay toppled beside a children’s playhouse, and a skipping rope lay where it had been thrown. He found what he was looking for in the rose bed, a football, took it to his car and reversed out of the courtyard to head for the station. He had driven this same route almost every day for thirty years, and could probably do so with his eyes closed.
He turned off at the old fire station and drove to the car park at Bøkkerfjellet. From this vantage point, he had a clear view of the fifty metres along Linneagate to the vehicle and staff entries. It was 23.04. The night shift had just come on and the evening shift was probably in the locker room.
Three minutes later, one of the oldest members of the uniform branch trundled out, pushing a bicycle. He stopped to put on his helmet and cycled off. The door opened again, and two men and a woman emerged. Wisting knew them all. Three cars drove out in turn from the car park in the back yard, none choosing his direction. When the lights had gone, he stepped out of the car, carrying the football.
The building next door was what was left of the Brynje hosiery factory, demolished to make way for the new police station. Wisting crept beside its old brick walls to a winter grit container. The back yard was dark, the only light from a streetlamp above the parking area. Through a crack between the container and the wall he had a clear view to the vehicle gate but could not, himself, be seen.
The entire police station seemed to be asleep. His own office was in darkness but a light shone in Nils Hammer’s. Nothing else suggested work was being done on the Linnea Kaupang case. From experience he knew that, by now, there would not be much more for the investigators to do. Four days had passed; most of the witnesses had been interviewed and the relevant places searched. Without anything more specific all they could do was wait.
The sky was filled with stars. He found the Plough, with Canes Venatici in pursuit. The Hunting Dogs. The air felt very cold and damp.
The new group would spend half an hour or so preparing for their shift, the senior officer running through the list of assignments, going over what had happened since they were last in. They updated themselves on planned and expected events, produced lists of stolen vehicles and wanted persons and checked over their equipment. Soon they would drive out from the basement garage and the gate would remain open behind them for about fifteen seconds.
A star fell through the darkness, leaving behind a slim, milky white trail. Looking up at the stars was like looking backwards in time. For all he knew, the hunting dogs could have died up there, disappeared from the heavens long ago.
Not until almost an hour later did the gate begin to clatter, sliding up as a patrol car rolled out. Wisting recognised the driver: Frank Kvastmo, one of the oldest and most experienced officers in the uniformed branch. At his side sat a student from the Police College, meaning there was at least one more officer still inside the station. The car stopped with its engine idling, waiting for the gate to begin its downward slide before setting out.
With the car gone and the gate about one and a half metres from the ground, Wisting threw the ball. It landed close to the opening, bounced on the asphalt and broke the optical beam installed to prevent crushing injuries. The gate stopped with a judder, slid up again and the ball rolled inside to stop in front of the washing bay. Wisting, head down, ran inside, where the strong ceiling light made him screw up his eyes.
The air was raw and damp, and the white walls spotted with black patches of mould. A CCTV camera was mounted on the ceiling. The last time they had made use of the video film was three years earlier when someone had placed a suspicious suitcase in front of the main entrance. The video footage was of such poor quality it had been difficult to identify the man who left it. They had talked about installing new CCTV equipment, but still had not found enough money. There were ten cameras in total at the police station. Wisting knew where they were located and that it would be difficult to avoid them all. This was a risk he had to take. If no one suspected a break-in the recording would be erased in seven days.
Two doors in the garage led into the station, one through the cells, no longer in use after the establishment of a central jail at the police station in Tønsberg. The other was the main door to the stairwell. Both were locked and he did not have a keycard although the code was in his head. His footsteps echoed off the concrete walls as he approached the locked main door, the sound hollow and cold.
The lock made a buzzing sound and the colour on the card reader changed from red to green. He crouched behind one of the unmarked police cars.
A uniformed officer shouldered his way out, carrying a large bag of equipment. A student followed. The door clicked shut behind them and they stepped across to the nearest police car, placed their bags on the rear seat and rummaged through the boot. Assured they had all they required, the student sat behind the wheel and eased the vehicle towards the gate. He lowered the side window and tugged at a cord hanging from the roof. The gate slid open and they drove into the night.
Wisting waited until the gate was fully closed again before he stood up. He stared at the stairwell door. Expecting it to be closed, he had worked out a plan. There were spare cards that could be used by staff who had forgotten their own, visiting investigators from out of town or workmen needing access. Sometimes these cards were left
in the police cars.
Inside the nearest car he searched through the centre console, behind the sun visor, and in the glove compartment without finding anything other than a petrol card and an empty snuffbox. He was luckier in the next, where a card lay beside the logbook in the glove compartment. He took it to the door, drew the card through the reader and keyed in the code. The green diode flashed as the lock buzzed and Wisting stepped through.
The historical archive where the Ellen case was stored was located at the end of the corridor and locked with a cylinder lock, but he knew the duty officer kept a master key in his office on the floor above. He climbed the stairs, emerging into the public area, and let himself into the duty officer’s office with his borrowed admittance card.
Pictures from the CCTV rolled across the screen of a dusty monitor. He had been alone in the station during the late night hours many times before, but this time he felt like a stranger: worse, like an outsider.
The master key hung in the cupboard where the performance and contingency plans were stored in suspended files. He almost dropped it when a gruff voice from the radio broke the silence.
‘Fox 3-0 answering.’
‘Drive along main road 40 to Bjerke. Report of someone driving off the road. Single vehicle off the road. No passengers reported injured.’
‘Message received.’
Wisting returned to the basement, walked along the corridor to the historical archives and was soon inside. The fluorescent tubes on the ceiling made a humming noise, blinked, and went on.
The box of documents from the Ellen investigation was sitting in the same place. He lifted it down and carried it to a separate area of the archive. Intended as a workroom it actually stored Christmas decorations, old orderly books, driving licence papers, enforcement books and journals, all waiting until they were old enough to be destroyed or transferred to the Regional State Archive.
He placed the box on the desk and looked at the contents. There were fewer documents than in the Cecilia Linde case, because they had never found a crime scene, a body or a suspect. The case consisted almost exclusively of witness statements given by people who knew Ellen Robekk or who were around Kleppaker when she disappeared.
Seventeen-year-old Ellen Robekk had vanished on a Sunday. She was still in bed when her parents came to her bedroom at twelve noon to say they were going for a walk in the woods. When they returned, she was gone.
Wisting left the details of the disappearance lying and took out the list of people, running his eyes over the names. He recalled some, but others were unfamiliar. Almost halfway down one of the sheets he spotted a name with an asterisk beside it. RAVNEBERG, Jonas. He was the subject of two documents. In one, he was interviewed as a witness; the other was a special report from one of the detectives.
He placed the printout on top of the box and lifted it, but put it back down again. There was a computer on the worktable. Wisting pushed the mouse across the tabletop, and the login image appeared on the screen.
He glanced from the computer screen to the box and back again. Then he abruptly made a decision and keyed in his own user name and password. He had obviously not been removed from data access, since he soon gained entry, and regretted it at once since it would be possible to trace when and where he had logged in. But there was no reason for anyone to check his data log unless they became suspicious.
He had seventeen unread emails, the majority group emails, and he did not bother reading those. Instead he clicked into the database for investigation of criminal cases and looked up the name Linnea Kaupang. The name appeared as the victim in case 11828923 – Missing woman under 18 years of age.
The documents were listed in chronological order. Wisting opened the document that had begun the enquiry. Linnea Kaupang was reported missing by her father on Saturday at quarter to one in the afternoon. By then, she had been missing for almost twenty-four hours.
The missing girl’s mother had died twelve years earlier, and her father had sole responsibility for his daughter. He had explained that she had not been at home when he came back from work on Friday. During the course of the evening, he had contacted her classmates and other acquaintances but no one had known where she was. She had not gone missing before and was not depressed or in any kind of dispute with her father.
The three final pieces of information were enough for the police to begin working on the case. The assumption could reasonably be made that something had happened to her, rather than leaving the matter in abeyance as with other runaway teenagers.
Two classmates said that Linnea had boarded the service bus between Larvik and Sandefjord. The driver was interviewed. He remembered her and was certain he had let her off at Snippen.
Wisting skipped over the search reports and instead read one summarising the door to door questioning in the neighbourhood. This strengthened the picture of Linnea Kaupang as a sociable, cheerful and positive girl, but no one had seen her.
The report concerning the trace on Linnea Kaupang’s mobile phone surprised Wisting. The last phone call was logged three hours before she disappeared. She had phoned a friend about schoolwork. The phone had been located in an area of coverage that included the Thor Heyerdahl High School. What was unusual was that when the phone was traced in real time, it was located in an area near Bakkenteigen between Horten and Tønsberg.
It was impossible to trace the route of travel to that point. On Monday evening, the signal had disappeared when the phone’s battery ran out. The investigators had thought as Wisting had, that it had been thrown from a car. Searches were conducted along the ditches bordering route 19 and, at the turn off leading to Berg Prison, they had found Linnea’s Sony Ericsson Xperia. The discovery provided no further answers, and the enquiry remained open.
As far as he knew, the discovery of the mobile phone had not been mentioned in the media. He could not understand why. If he had been in charge he would have gone public, hoping for fresh information to be presented. So far the disappearance remained a local case, but if residents of the Horten area learned this it would lead to further tip-offs and observations.
A sudden noise startled Wisting out of his thoughts. A fire door slammed shut somewhere in the building, echoing through the basement. He listened but, as he heard nothing further, turned back to the computer.
Two people had been set aside for special attention. One was a retired sailor who lived in the nearest house. He was described as a recluse and alcoholic. Other neighbours had seen him sitting up late at nights watching pornographic films on TV. He was interviewed twice and had no alibi for the time frame of Linnea’s disappearance.
Beside the stop where Linnea left the bus, was a shared house for people with mental illnesses. The residents and staff members were interviewed, many noting that Rolf Tangen, a former drug addict who had been convicted of rape, had been out that afternoon. He had returned about half past six in the evening, sweaty and upset. Tangen himself gave no explanation other than that he had been walking in the woods.
Wisting logged out of the computer and carried the box of documents towards the door. By his own lights this was not theft, though to authority it certainly would be, and he would have serious problems if caught. Shouldering the door open tentatively, he looked out and listened: nothing. He walked towards the garage.
The enormous basement space was in total darkness until the movement sensors switched on the power. He set the box on the floor beside the bin frame, and returned to the duty office with the key. From the interference on the police radio, he understood that both patrol cars were busy investigating a burglar alarm at the Farris factory.
In his peripheral vision he caught sight of a movement on the CCTV monitor. Someone was walking through the empty jail section. The screen switched to the garage and Nils Hammer on a shortcut used frequently by investigators on their way home. He stopped at the bin where Wisting had placed the box, to throw something away. The screen switched again to show the deserted entrance area.
The case files were sitting where he left them. He replaced the borrowed card in the glove compartment of the unmarked police car before picking up the box and tugging on the gate cord. As it closed behind him, it dawned on him that he had forgotten the ball.
52
Wisting got home at seven minutes to two. Suzanne’s car was parked at the top of the driveway, in front of Line’s Golf, but they must both be in bed by now. He parked and took the box inside knowing it would be impossible to sleep with all these thoughts whirling in his head.
The house was silent; he could hear only the sounds he was so used to that they barely registered: the hum of the heat pump, ticking of the kitchen clock, hissing through a water pipe, the fridge switching itself off. He set the box on the kitchen table and skimmed through the introductory reports on Ellen.
Frank Robekk had called the police. As uncle of the missing girl, his brother had contacted him when they began to worry. She had slept late on the day of her disappearance, but there was nothing unusual in that, since it was the weekend. Her parents had gone for a walk in the woods while she was still in bed.
When they returned there was water on the floor of the shower cabinet. Her mother said that she was wearing a pair of jeans and a plain yellow T-shirt. They thought she might have gone to her uncle’s farm where she had a horse stabled, but the horse was still in its stall and it had not been cleaned out.
That day’s interview with Jonas Ravneberg was relatively short. Most of the time was spent explaining the reason he had been called for interview. A witness had observed a red Saab 900 parked at the side of the road not far from the turn-off leading to Ellen Robekk’s house. This witness worked as a salesman at the local Saab dealership, and checked the number plate to see if it was a car he had sold. He could therefore remember that it was a car from out of town with the letters ND at the beginning of the registration number.
The Hunting Dogs Page 18
