The Caveman

by Jorn Lier Horst

  Donald Baker glanced across at his two colleagues. It was obvious they spotted something in the picture that Wisting’s team had not. ‘Where is this?’ he asked. The pitch of his deep voice had dropped.

  ‘We don’t know,’ Wisting admitted. ‘It strikes me now that this might be the place where Godwin’s forefathers lived. We intend to show them to local historians in an attempt to discover its whereabouts.’

  Donald Baker licked his lips. ‘There’s something else we haven’t discussed,’ he said, looking up at the screen again. ‘We’re going to need a list of girls who’ve gone missing.’

  36

  It was dark on Line’s next visit to Viggo Hansen’s house. Feeling uncomfortable, she switched on the lights as she moved from room to room. At the living room doorway, she stood listening intently. Not a sound, she decided, before crossing to the TV to examine the two armchairs.

  The chair on the left had the dark, damp stains from the corpse, but otherwise was not at all worn. The chair on the right, on the other hand, showed distinct signs of wear on the seat cushions and armrests, and a decorative cushion was flattened against the back. Surely, this was where he usually sat.

  The floor told its own story. Between the well-used armchair and the coffee table lay a trail of breadcrumbs and other food. On the floor covering itself a darker patch ran between the chair and the kitchen door, grime trodden in from all the times Viggo Hansen had walked there and back.

  In the middle of the kitchen she scanned the cramped space. Apart from a cup on the table, it was clean and tidy. She was on the point of returning to the living room when a detail caught her eye. The coffee machine was half-full of water. She opened the lid of the filter holder to find dry coffee.

  It had been made ready, she thought, which is what her mother had done when expecting guests. She would fill the container with water and put coffee in the filter so she had only to switch it on when they arrived.

  Had Viggo Hansen been expecting a visitor? If so, who? And why had he asked a locksmith to fit a double lock on his front door? Had he been afraid of intruders?

  She had the police documents in her shoulder bag. Sitting at the kitchen table, she looked for the autopsy report and spread it out. There was nothing to support the theory that Viggo Hansen had been killed, but neither did it eliminate the idea. The conclusion was clear: no cause of death could be established because the deterioration of the body was too advanced.

  She felt an urge to phone her father, but refrained. Her imagination was running away with her. The armchair and a prepared coffee machine were not proof of anything.

  In the living room she stared at her reflection in the windowpanes before turning to survey this room in the same way she had the kitchen. Nothing captured her interest. There was nothing she had not seen before, yet she felt a powerful sensation that she had overlooked something. The feeling forced her to go through the house again, room by room, until, in the end, she stood at the top of the basement stairs, a chilly draught swirling around her ankles.

  The idea of going down did not appeal, but she was desperate to see what lay behind the locked door. There was a key cupboard in the outer hallway, perhaps the storeroom key would be in there. In the porch she flipped open the little door. Four empty hooks but, even if she managed to locate the right key, she had no guarantee it would open the padlock since it was rusty and coated in verdigris.

  Remembering a toolbox down below, she descended into the basement, thinking of opening the padlock with a hammer blow. She would buy a new padlock and hang the key in the cupboard. No hammer was evident in the toolbox, so she rummaged to find a spanner that would do the same job.

  A thought struck her. Where were Viggo Hansen’s other keys? His house keys? The keys for the two new locks on his front door? The police had drilled through them to force entry. Afterwards, they had fitted a new lock, but she had never seen or read anything of the two original keys.

  She put down the spanner and returned to the kitchen to sit at the table with the documents still spread out. The report detailing the items removed from the house listed mostly belongings for use in identification, including a toothbrush and comb forwarded for DNA analysis. No keys.

  She flicked to the forensics report. One of the first points was a description of the clothes Viggo Hansen had been wearing: a pair of jeans, T-shirt, underpants and socks, a wristwatch removed from the body’s left arm, and three kroner coins found in his right trouser pocket, but no keys.

  At home, Line usually put her keys in the drawer of a bureau in the hallway. She got to her feet and headed for the entrance. One of the sideboard drawers was a typical junk receptacle. Searching among ballpoint pens, receipts, instructions and other bits and pieces, she did not find any keys. Nor were there any in the pockets of the jackets hanging from the coat hooks.

  It crossed her mind that she had seen a pair of trousers hanging over a chair in the bedroom, so she went there and searched through the pockets, but they too were empty. She hunted through the kitchen drawers, in the clothes hanging in the wardrobe and bundled in the laundry basket, and every other conceivable place without coming across a single key. Only one explanation remained. The keys had been removed from the house: either by the police, who had neglected to list them in their report, or by someone else who had locked the door and left Viggo Hansen dead in the chair in front of the television.

  37

  A deafening silence filled the conference room. Donald Baker’s words still hung in the air, creating a collective anxiety and a tension no one wanted to break.

  Wisting felt the skin on his face turn cold. The case they were working on had grown to undreamed-of proportions. He did not know why the thought had not struck him previously, but if a serial murderer from the USA had been living in Norway for more than twenty years, there was no reason he would not have continued to kill.

  The idea made his hands sweaty, and perspiration formed along his hairline. He could not think of any missing women in his own area, but a missing person case in Porsgrunn a couple of years earlier had received a great deal of media attention, and never been solved. The same applied to a case in Kristiansand in which a young girl was last seen at the verge beside the zoo, hitching a lift. And then there was the Diana case in Drammen, and at least a couple of cases in Oslo. Only accounting for cases he recalled from newspaper coverage, he was able to count five young women.

  Clearing his throat, he addressed the FBI agent in the dark suit. ‘What is it you see in the pictures? What is it we’ve overlooked?’

  ‘The well,’ Donald Baker answered.

  Wisting looked at the screen again. In the centre of the picture there was a round, paved area.

  ‘Several of Robert Godwin’s victims were found on deserted farms like these,’ Baker said. ‘At the bottom of disused wells.’

  Wisting picked up the sheaf of papers, copies of the American case documents. ‘It says here the women were found in ditches, that he picked up hitchhikers along the highways and dumped them afterwards.’

  ‘Those are the earlier cases. The ones that gave us the DNA evidence. Later, he got smarter and hid his victims. Seventeen women were found in wells and similar hiding places. One of them was found after a few days. Our technicians found Godwin’s DNA on her, but we haven’t been able to link him conclusively to the sixteen others. They are listed only as possible victims.’

  ‘Show us the two other places,’ Wisting said, looking at the screen.

  Espen Mortensen clicked through the images until he reached an area where there were no buildings, only an open field with a tractor track between the trees.

  ‘Look at that!’ Nils Hammer said, pointing at a circular concrete slab protruding from the grass at the outer edge of the field. ‘That’s a soil irrigation tank or something like that.’

  The third place where Bob Crabb had taken pictures was also an abandoned smallholding, a white farmhouse and grey barn among slender birch trees. To the left of the bar
n, an old-fashioned, pyramid-shaped well cover was visible.

  ‘Bob Crabb must have surveyed all the old wells in the area,’ Mortensen said.

  ‘How far have we come with finding where these places are?’

  ‘Benjamin’s working on it,’ Torunn Borg said. ‘He’s been speaking to various people with local knowledge all day long, but I don’t think it’s brought any results.’

  Leif Malm of Kripos had kept quiet throughout the meeting, until now. ‘I can have a list of missing women ready some time tonight,’ he said. ‘The question is what parameters we should set as far as age and geography are concerned.’

  ‘With us he operated across five adjoining States,’ John Bantam said. ‘An area with a circumference of more than three thousand kilometres.’

  ‘Everything south of Trondheim,’ Wisting decided.

  Christine Thiis coughed. ‘How many might we be talking about?’

  Leif Malm stared into space, in the direction of the window and the darkness outside. ‘Over a period of twenty years,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘around five hundred in total in all of Norway. Mostly in the south-east, and mostly men. I would think we’ll end up with a list in the region of one hundred women who cannot be accounted for.’

  ‘A hundred?’

  ‘Of course, that could be pared down. Some were lost at sea, others on walking trips in the mountains. Some will be mentally ill people missing from institutions, and some have left suicide notes. Perhaps we’ll be left with a total of fifty missing without trace.’

  Donald Baker sat up straight. ‘Follow the main roads,’ he said. ‘Robert Godwin found his victims along the Interstate Highway. You need to look for young women who disappeared along the motorways or close by.’ He turned and pointed at the picture on the screen. ‘Because as soon as you find out where this is, you’re going to start finding bodies.’

  38

  The padlock did not give way at the first blow. Line raised the hefty spanner once more and hit it again with force so that it burst open and was left dangling from the hasp. She unhooked it and opened the door. Light spilled onto a pile of boxes stacked on the concrete floor.

  She groped her way to a wall switch to turn on the bare light bulb suspended from the ceiling. It afforded only a dim glow that did not reach as far as the corners. The storeroom was almost empty but, in addition to three cardboard boxes on the floor, there was an old cardboard suitcase with metal fittings and some clothes hanging from pegs along one wall. Everything was covered in dust.

  Line pulled one of the boxes into the light and opened it to find ring binders with the name Gustav Hansen written on the spines. She picked up one and leafed through the papers: various letters and documents from Bergenshalvøens Kommunale Kraftselskap, a Bergen power company, dating from the fifties, another binder marked Bergsdalsvassdraget, a water course in Hordaland, containing a number of technical specifications and working diagrams.

  Documents left behind by his father, Line thought, finding a folder held closed by an elastic band at the bottom of the box. She released the elastic and opened the file, a bundle of old newspaper cuttings. The top one was from Bergens Tidende and dated 27th June 1960. Safe blown at Bergen post office was the headline.

  Line lifted the dry sheet of newsprint and read: Around three o’clock last night, a safe-blower succeeded in blowing a safe at Bergen central post office in Småstrandgaten. People living in the vicinity were woken by the explosion, and a taxi driver saw the man at close quarters as he disappeared in the direction of Rådstuplassen. The safe-blower entered the post office premises with the aid of a ladder propped up against the wall of the building where a window on the first floor was broken into. It is feared that a considerable sum of money may have been stolen, and nervous post office officials anxiously await the crime scene experts finishing their work so that they can count what is left.

  The next clipping was dated two days later: Safe-blower got away with 175,000 kroner was the caption extending across four columns.

  The man who blew the safe at the central post office in Småstrandgaten on Sunday night struck at a time when the cash stored there was at its maximum, Postmaster Kåre Palmer Holm informed Bergens Tidende. Record proceeds of around 175,000 kroner.

  Next day, the newspaper was able to report that the safe-blower had been arrested.

  Police have arrested a man from Eastern Norway suspected of blowing the safe at the central post office on Sunday night and stealing the contents, a total of 175,000 kroner. The man was arrested at a workers’ barracks in Masfjorden where he worked on the construction of the Matrevassdraget hydro-electric power station.

  175,000 kroner, Line mused. How much would that be in today’s money? Around two million?

  There were several news cuttings.

  Safe-blower refuses to talk to police, was the next headline. The article went on to explain how the man denied having anything to do with the crime and refused several times to be questioned.

  In another cutting, Police Inspector Brinchmann gave details of the evidence police had amassed against the man from Eastern Norway. They had found traces of powder from the fire retardant insulation material in the safe on his clothing, and he could be linked to the theft of dynamite from the construction site where he was employed. Witnesses at his workplace testified that he had been off site in a work vehicle on the night in question.

  Money vanished without trace was the newspaper’s claim on the day before his trial commenced at Bergen City Court.

  The final cutting was an account of the court case at which Gustav Hansen was convicted and sentenced to imprisonment for three years and ten months: As aggravating factors in this case, the unanimous judgment of the court has noted that there is no doubt that the accused methodically strove to become proficient as a safe-blower, the considerable sum of cash that was stolen, and that the accused has not shown any willingness to cooperate with the police investigation or to assist with the recovery of the stolen money.

  Returning the newspaper cuttings to the folder, Line closed it and put the elastic band back in place.

  Family secrets, she thought. This must have been difficult to bear. The day his father was arrested must have been a fateful moment in Viggo Hansen’s life. It can never have been the same again.

  She put everything back and investigated the other two boxes: shirts, ties, a pair of suit trousers, a jacket and highly polished shoes in one and work clothes in the other.

  Reinforced at the corners, the suitcase had two catches and a leather handle. She pushed the catches aside and opened them to find it half-filled with old framed photographs, a few gramophone records, a couple of books, a thick, brown envelope and a bundle of yellowed letters tied together with a length of tattered string.

  A sheet of paper lay on top. Line unfolded it and found that it was a death certificate for Gustav Hansen, born 19th October 1928. Time of death was 24th May 1969 at around 05.00. The cause of death was given as intentional self-harm, death by hanging.

  Line let the hand holding the yellow paper rest on her lap as she looked around the room. What was left of Gustav Hansen was hoarded here, she reflected. It did not take up much space, but had been placed here and the door closed and locked. A shelf unit had been installed in front of the door as if the surviving members of the family did not want to be reminded of him.

  She put the death certificate on the floor beside her as she looked through the rest of the suitcase contents.

  There were old photographs. One of them showed a family gathered around a settee, and others depicted four men and two women, all with solemn and serious expressions. From the clothes, the pictures appeared to have been taken around the turn of the last century. Line turned them over, but found nothing written on the back. No dates or names.

  On the sleeves of the old LP records by artistes such as Bill Haley and his Comets, Pat Boone, Nat King Cole and Elvis Presley, Gustav Hansen had written his name in the lower right-hand corner. Musicians whose
music was still played on the radio, but whose heyday had been in the fifties, when Viggo Hansen’s father was young.

  Line lifted one of the books. Owls to Athens by Herman Wildenvey, published in 1953. There was a dedication on the flyleaf: To Gustav Hansen on 19th October 1953. Best Wishes, Herman Wildenvey. A birthday present.

  There were a number of poetry collections, by André Bjerke, Gunnar Reiss-Andersen and Tarjei Vesaas. Line stacked them on the floor beside the suitcase and lifted the bundle of letters. Without removing the string, she understood that these were letters Gustav Hansen had sent to his wife from prison. She put them aside.

  The brown envelope contained old printed letters and documents with Gothic script. A faded postcard showed a steamship tied up in port, DS Norge emblazoned in large white letters on the prow. The card had been sent to Anna Sofie Nielsen, Manvik, Brunlanæs and was dated 26th April 1889. The florid handwriting was difficult to decipher, but was addressed to Dear mother, and said something about it being difficult to say a final farewell, and that the next stop was America. The card was signed Your Hans.

  More letters followed in which Hans wrote of fertile fields, good crops, streets with electric light and test drives in swanky motor cars. Hans Gustav Nielsen settled in the Midwest, met a woman who had emigrated from Western Norway, married and had several children with her.

  Another document, a family tree, showed how Hans Gustav Nielsen was the brother of Viggo Hansen’s great-grandfather. All the members of his family were included there, packed away in the old suitcase.

  Line sat in the dim light with the family tree chart in her hand as a new possibility opened. Viggo Hansen might have relatives.

  39

  A set of old police documents in a transparent plastic folder sat in the middle of Wisting’s desk when he returned to his office. Bjørg Karin had written on a yellow post-it note that she hoped this was what Line needed.