‘Torunn and Benjamin are surveying the area,’ Wisting explained. ‘The buildings are spread out. Smallholdings and individual houses. The plan is to conduct interviews with everyone who lives out there. It would just have been so much easier if we knew exactly who he was.’
Christine Thiis was chewing the end of a ballpoint pen. ‘What else do we have?’
‘Six strands of hair, clothes and shoes manufactured abroad, an advertising brochure for a floating church,’ Mortensen summarised. ‘The last item is actually the most specific thing we have. It means that the murder most likely took place at some time after the Elida berthed here on the 9th and 10th August.’
That’s not much to build a case on, Wisting thought as he looked at the children again. Nevertheless it was a start, and he knew from experience that they were going to obtain more information. The case would grow, layer by layer, just like a snowball rolled across the snow, steadily increasing in size.
10
Line spent only a quarter of an hour clearing snow from her car. Afterwards she showered, packed and made preparations to travel. In the meantime, it began snowing again, and a fine dusting covered the car.
Throwing her bag onto the rear seat, she brushed the windscreen before settling behind the steering wheel and turning the key. The engine turned over repeatedly, but did not start. She switched off before making another attempt. Several lights on the dashboard lit up. She pumped the accelerator and finally the car sprang to life. She revved the engine and moved out from the kerb, tyres spinning on the slippery surface before gripping the snow.
Wet snowflakes on the windscreen melted immediately. The wipers squeaked and clicked, and the heater slowly blasted hot air until the windscreen was clear of condensation.
The trip home usually took an hour and a half. When she reached the halfway point, she drove into a petrol station and had her windscreen wipers changed. Before she drove on, she opened her laptop and checked her email. A reply from police prosecutor Christine Thiis was among the new messages.
Refusal, she thought as she double-clicked on the message. The response had come far too speedily for it to be positive.
She prepared herself for disappointment, and was surprised to read: Duplicate copies of the case documents can be collected from the police station in Larvik on short-term loan. The local authority has been appointed to take charge of the estate of the deceased. The trustees have no objections to Verdens Gang being allowed access to the residence of the late occupant. The keys may be uplifted here.
In conclusion, the police lawyer wished her luck with the newspaper article. Line broke into a broad smile. This was a better start to her project than she had anticipated. An orange snowplough passed on the motorway with chains rattling, followed by a procession of cars unable to overtake. She decided to check the online newspapers.
Her own had headlines about four different weather-related stories. The local paper at home in Larvik also discussed the weather. Further down she found a story that aroused her curiosity. Person found dead was the simple caption. She clicked on the link and read the story.
On Friday afternoon, someone had been found dead at Halle. The brief article did not contain much more information than that. The body showed signs of having lain for some considerable time and had been transported to the Institute of Public Health for post-mortem examination and identification.
The story itself did not provide many more answers than the caption: a person had been found dead. She closed the lid of the laptop and returned it to her bag.
A whining noise came from somewhere under the bonnet when the car began moving again. She drowned out the sound by switching on the radio, searching for a station that was not playing Christmas music.
It did not take long for her to join the queue behind the snowplough. Sometime later the grey waters of the Farris lake appeared on her right and she took the exit lane for Larvik. The roads leading into town were not so well ploughed; slush squelched under the tyres and sloshed against the wheel arches. The lake had still not frozen over, and the wind was churning the surface with choppy ripples.
She parked in a vacant space in front of the police station. Snow had blown into drifts and piled up in front of the entrance. She trudged across the car park and made her way into the red brick building. The young man in uniform behind the front desk glanced up from his paperwork and gave her a nod. Line, who had never seen him before, introduced herself.
‘I’m here to see Christine Thiis,’ she said.
‘Do you have an appointment?’
‘Sort of, but we didn’t arrange a particular time. I’ve just to collect some documents.’
The police officer spent some time finding an internal phone number on a list and keyed it into the phone on the desk. ‘It’s the duty desk,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a visitor. A journalist from VG.’
He listened to her answer and reached out for an envelope and form on a worktop behind him. ‘Yes, it’s here,’ he said into the receiver. He wrapped up the conversation and handed Line the envelope. ‘Christine Thiis is busy, but she left this for you.’
Line accepted the papers. The envelope was marked with her name.
‘You need to sign here,’ the police officer pushed a sheet of paper across the counter.
It was a standard form for lending case documents on which she had to confirm that she would not copy the papers, let any unauthorised person have access to them, or use them for any purpose other than that agreed. She picked up a pen and wrote her name at the foot of the page.
As she returned the form she considered whether to ask for her father and let him know she had arrived. They could perhaps have a cup of coffee in his office or something like that. She shrugged the idea off, more enthusiastic about getting started.
En route to the car, she discovered that the folder was slimmer than she had expected. She held the envelope between her fingers, surmising that it contained something more than sheets of paper. House keys, she thought, and smiled contentedly. A gust of wind swept a flurry of snow over the seats when she opened the car door. She stepped inside, inserted the key in the ignition and turned it as she pumped the accelerator pedal. The engine made a few clicking noises before rumbling into life.
On the way down from Oslo she had planned how she would install herself in what had been her mother’s workroom upstairs. It was a pleasant room with a large desk, a comfortable office chair and a cork noticeboard on the wall.
She could just make out the depressions carved by the wheels of her father’s car on the snow in front of the house. A snowplough had left an enormous drift blocking the driveway, too deep for her to take the chance of driving through it. Instead, she parked at the kerb and left the engine running while she plodded up to the steps. She grabbed hold of the snow shovel and scooped the snow away from the entrance before returning to dig an opening in the bank of snow. Perspiration broke out on her neck, and she straightened her back, leaning against the shovel, to take a rest.
Viggo Hansen’s house was situated on the opposite side of the street, barely fifty metres away. The dark windows were partly hidden behind the sprawling branches of the gnarled old apple trees in the garden.
Line bit her lip. A gust of wind rushing past made her shiver. The snow was melting on her hair and running down her forehead. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and continued to shovel. Twenty minutes later she drove her car to the front of the house.
Stamping the snow off her feet on the steps before letting herself in, she headed for the kitchen. The coffee machine had been a present to her father last Christmas, but it was also possible to use it to make tea. She switched it on to make a cup before carrying her belongings to her bedroom upstairs and taking the envelope full of police documents into her mother’s old workroom.
One wall was covered with bookshelves from floor to ceiling. Literary fiction, biographies, history books, non-fiction, magazines and ring binders, all in a blessed combination. In th
e corner, just inside the door, there was a cushioned armchair with a small table and reading lamp beside it. In the centre, her mother’s desk, with drawers on either side, was placed so that whoever sat there had their back to the door and could look out onto the street in front of the house.
Line put down her cup and opened the curtains. As the silver, snowy light entered the room, she felt a draught from a chink in the window frame.
A solitary light above Viggo Hansen’s door shed light on his garden. The brown-stained timber house was slightly smaller than her father’s, with a flat roof and a dense hedge surrounding the property. The door was pale brown, with a little square of yellow, textured glass. The snow lay deep on the steps and icicles were hanging from the roof.
She weighed the envelope containing the case documents in her hand for a moment before taking it across to the desk, where she sat down and switched on the lamp. It spread a pleasant glow over the desktop and left the rest of the room bathed in semi-darkness. She opened the envelope with her fingernail. The documents were gathered into a bundle inside a green folder with an elastic band around it.
A bunch of keys remained in the envelope. She emptied them onto the desk: a plastic fob advertising the name of a locksmith and a shiny house key attached to a ring. The police must have used a drill to force the lock and had a new one installed after they had gained entry. She picked up the key, letting it rest in the palm of her hand, and curled her fingers around it before she let it go. Then she took hold of the document folder and pulled off the elastic band.
11
A snow blower was making a racket outside, penetrating the conference room at the police station. The regular thrum of the engine subsided each time the driver turned behind a snowdrift or round the corner of a building.
Around the table, the atmosphere was muted. Wisting’s eyes scanned his colleagues, now understanding that the case was a homicide and that they had the worst starting point imaginable. They had no idea who the dead man was. Already he could see that none of the investigators present would report anything new.
The only one who might had not yet arrived. Throughout the day, Espen Mortensen had maintained direct contact with the forensics experts and received details as they were uncovered. Wisting already had a provisional report from the pathologist. The body had been measured and the height estimated at between five feet ten and six feet one, with a weight of 26 kilos, though it had probably been three times that when the man was alive. Of Caucasian origin, between fifty and sixty years old when he died, hair colour was established as dark blond. Cause of death was attributed to head injuries.
His clothes were listed and he knew Torunn Borg had been working on brand names and sales outlets without turning up anything on where he might have come from.
Espen Mortensen appeared at the door with a bundle of papers, his mobile phone ringing. He took the call and listened at the doorway, his eyes wandering until they met Wisting’s; staring, but at the same time with something distant about him. He turned on his heel and strode back to his office.
‘Line was here today,’ Christine Thiis said, filling the silence. Her notepad was as blank as Wisting’s own.
‘Did you speak to her?’ he asked, remembering that he had not heard from his daughter.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘I left the documents for her to collect at the front desk.’
Wisting glanced at the clock: 4.05, and began the meeting. At this stage in the investigation there was a great deal of emphasis on relating what little they actually knew, in order to force the work forward. No plan existed on how to solve the case. All suggestions, ideas and thoughts had to be thrown onto the table, sorted and sifted through.
He opened the meeting with a summary of what had been done so far, then invited discussion, giving them all an opportunity to provide a résumé of what they knew.
‘Benjamin?’ he said, riffling through his papers. ‘You’ve spoken to Per and Supattra Halle?’
The young detective nodded as he produced the witness statements from the residents of the farm where the dead man’s body had been found. ‘I think we can disregard them entirely,’ he said. ‘They grow strawberries and run a “pick your own” business in the summer months, between the middle of June and the end of July. On the sixth of August they travelled to Thailand and didn’t return until the first of October.’
Wisting took notes. ‘The Elida was here on the ninth and tenth of August,’ he said, drawing the same conclusion as Benjamin Fjeld. The brochure found wrapped in plastic in the dead man’s inside pocket suggested that the murder had probably been committed sometime after Per and Supattra Halle had gone abroad. ‘Was there anyone looking after the farm while they were away?’
‘Yes, they had a kind of relief worker there from one of the other farms. He’s coming in tomorrow morning.’
‘What’s his name?’
‘Jonathan Wang,’ the young detective said, and added the details Wisting really wanted to know. ‘I’ve checked the records. Nothing there. He’s got a clean sheet.’
Wisting noted the name and saw that Christine Thiis did likewise. For the present it was no more than a name, but Jonathan Wang had been alone in the proximity of the discovery site at the assumed time of the murder. It was something to work on.
He continued, looking at Torunn Berg. ‘Door to door enquiries?
‘We’ve talked to most people on the farms round about. Nothing stands out, but a lot of information needs to be worked through. For instance, itinerant workers have visited several of them, offering to sharpen knives and tools.’
‘That adds up,’ Nils Hammer interrupted. ‘We had some reports of deceptions in connection with that last summer. They were driving a Swedish-registered car.’
‘Do we have a case file on that?’ Christine Thiis asked.
‘No, but the registration number was logged in one of the reports,’ Torunn Borg said.
‘Anything else?’
‘People don’t remember very much. Some noticed a foreigner with a camera, others recall a delivery van in the farmyard towards the end of the summer. A German asked the way to Mølen, and a Polish deaf mute was selling pictures at the door. Among other things.’
Wisting reached for a coffee cup. Everyday details such as those remained loosely attached in people’s memory banks and had to be brought into the light of day by gentle prodding. Most likely this information would not lead to anything other than extra work, but experience told him that somewhere among all these particulars there could be one tiny, crucial detail. What seemed unimportant now could become extremely important in a day or a week’s time. Or a year, for that matter.
‘You’re following them up?’ he asked.
‘As long as nothing more interesting crops up.’
Espen Mortensen appeared at the door again, now with just a single sheet of paper in each hand, looking from one to the other before holding them both out.
‘What have you got?’ Hammer asked.
‘We have a result on the fingerprint.’ Mortensen stepped into the room.
‘Fingerprints?’ Wisting asked, remembering the shrivelled fingers of the corpse.
‘On the leaflet in his inside pocket,’ Mortensen said. ‘The one wrapped in plastic.’
‘Who?’ Hammer asked. ‘Whose fingerprints have they found?’
Mortensen glanced down. ‘Robert Godwin.’
‘Who’s Robert Godwin?’
Mortensen placed the sheet in his right hand on the table.
Wisting leaned forward, a nerve twitching on his forehead as he read the caption: Wanted by the FBI.
12
It took Line less than an hour to read through the documents. The case was detailed chronologically, starting with a report from the police patrol that had arrived on the scene first and forced their way into the house. Next, a form from a doctor certifying the death. Next, an account of the interview with the man from the power company who had found Viggo Hansen when he visited to di
sconnect the electricity.
Successive documents included copies of correspondence with his general practitioner and reports from an investigator who had spoken to the postman and the nearest neighbours. A document headed Report of search and seizure with a list of what the police removed from the house for further examination. Finally she read the report from the crime scene technician, accompanied by a folder of illustrations in which the body was sketched on a floor plan showing the layout of the rooms in the small building: two bedrooms, kitchen, bathroom, two storerooms, a porch and a staircase leading down to the basement.
The photographs were black and white, those depicting Viggo Hansen’s corpse morbid and unpleasant, reminiscent of a mummified body. The cadaver was totally dehydrated and shrivelled. The dry, hard skin had shrunk and stretched across the knuckles. Sitting in a chair, it resembled a grey-black doll. There was something sinister and surreal about it, making Viggo Hansen a stranger even in death.
In front of the chair with the body was a table and, in front of that, a television set, still switched on. Line recognised the Discovery Channel logo.
One of the images showed a TV magazine open on the table with the list of programmes for 11th August. An asterisk was drawn beside FBI’s Archives. Despite the tragic circumstances, Line could not suppress a smile. The news editor at VG would get to read what he was watching when he died after all.
None of the case documents conveyed anything about who Viggo Hansen really was as a person, only as he was after his life had ended. Of greatest interest was the report from Espen Mortensen which not only described the corpse, but also the house, in a level-headed and objective fashion. Both the front and verandah doors at the back had been locked, all the windows closed, and there was no sign of a break-in. The house was tidy, and showed no evidence of a struggle or that he had received a visit of any kind.
On the basis of the open TV guide, the technician concluded that the death had taken place at some time on the evening of Thursday 11th August.
The Caveman Page 5
